When did they stop picking cotton by hand?
The Southern growers soon followed suit and the age of hand picked cotton ended. After 1960 almost the entire industry used mechanical pickers... and new social problems arose, but the end of hand picked cotton came about slowly from 1936-1960.
The first commercial production of mechanical cotton pickers were manufactured in 1949, and these machines did not exist in large numbers until the early 1950s.
When Did Cotton Picking End? Prior to the 1930s, cotton harvesting was done entirely by picking cotton by hand endâit wasn't until a man named John Rust came up with a âharvesting locomotiveâ in the late 1930s that any semblance of harvesting innovation became a reality.
1950s COTTON INDUSTRY & COTTON HARVESTING ... - YouTube
Often slaves, and later sharecroppers, would pick cotton from sunrise to sunset. In August, this would result in a 13 hour workday spent in the hot sun. To pick the cotton, a worker would pull the white, fluffy lint from the boll, trying to not cut his hands on the sharp ends of the boll.
Manual picking of cotton is prevalent in the remaining counties that produce it. China still 100% hand picks its cotton harvest as does India. Other major cotton producing countries that still use a large manual labor force for picking cotton as it was done in America in the 1800's include Pakistan, Turkey and Brazil.
Conventional harvester
The current cotton picker is a self-propelled machine that removes cotton lint and seed (seed-cotton) from the plant at up to six rows at a time.
Since hand labor is no longer used in the U.S. to harvest cotton, the crop is harvested by machines, either a picker or a stripper. Cotton picking machines have spindles that pick (twist) the seed cotton from the burrs that are attached to plants' stems.
Beginning in 1800, slaves cultivated cotton for sixty years; but free blacks were cotton laborers for nearly a hundred years after emancipation.
In general, planters expected a good âhand,â or slave, to work ten acres of land and pick two hundred pounds of cotton a day.
Does it hurt to pick cotton?
Cotton bolls are sharp and pointy and can injure your hands. While this is not required, wearing gloves will help preserve your hands as you pick the cotton.
Slaves follow with their hoes, cutting up the grass and cotton, leaving hills two feet and a half apart. This is called scraping cotton. In two weeks more commences the second hoeing. This time the furrow is thrown towards the cotton.
Gone but not forgotten is true enough. In the late 1950's and early 1960's folks got paid only two cents a pound for picking cotton in Bolivar. As a kid, I picked cotton for a week one year and made all of $11.00 ... my best day was picking 100 lbs of cotton.
It can come as as little surprise that the term 'cotton-picking' originated in the southern states of the USA, where it is usually pronounced cotton-pickin'.
Cotton planting took place in March and April, when slaves planted seeds in rows around three to five feet apart. Over the next several months, from April to August, they carefully tended the plants and weeded the cotton rows. Beginning in August, all the plantation's slaves worked together to pick the crop.
From a historical perspective, cotton was originally picked by the hands of slaves living on plantations and the owner's profit margins were very good due to the over 400 years of free labor.
Once the Industrial Revolution kicked into full gear, inventors began tinkering with ways to develop machines that would pick cotton for them, rather than having to have tons of workers out in the field picking it by hand. In the late 1920s, John Daniel Rust began developing the very first practical cotton picker.
