Cotton picker

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Cotton picker at work

The mechanical cotton picker is a machine that automates cotton harvesting.

It was first invented in the 1920s, but was not made practical until the 1950s, and even then, it was not immediately implemented on most farms.

The first pickers were only capable of harvesting one row of cotton at a time, but were still able to replace up to forty hand laborers. 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. There are two types of pickers in use today. One is the "stripper" picker, primarily found in use in Texas. It removes not only the lint from the plant, but a fair deal of the plant matter as well(such as unopened bolls). Later, the plant matter is separated from the lint through a process dropping heavier matter before the lint makes it to the basket to the rear of the picker. The other type of picker is the "spindle" picker. It uses rows of barbed spindles that rotate at high speed and remove the seed-cotton from the plant. The seed-cotton is then removed from the spindles by a counter-rotating doffer and is then blown up into the basket. Once the basket is full the picker dumps the seed-cotton into a "module builder". The module builder creates a compact "brick" of seed-cotton, weighing in at approximately 21,000 lb (20 un-ginned bales), which can be stored in the field or in the "gin yard" until it is ginned. Each ginned bale weighs roughly 480 lb (218.2 kg).

Some people prefer the term cotton harvester to cotton picker when referring to the machine because cotton picker is also regarded as racial slur, a highly derogatory reference for black people, especially African Americans. It is considered very offensive because it makes a direct reference to the days when most blacks in America were held as slaves, many of whom were forced to perform manual labour on cotton plantations.