Mechanizing the Cotton Harvest 1 



By James H. Street 



Associate Professor of Economics 

 University College, Rutgers University 



[With two plates] 



During the 1935 crop season nearly- Z 1 /^ million bales of cotton, or 

 about one-fourth of the American crop, were harvested by machine. 

 In California, where mechanization is farthest advanced, machines 

 gathered two-thirds of the crop. Yet a scant decade before, the amount 

 of cotton that was mechanically harvested was negligible. 



Behind this revolutionary change, which is still proceeding, lies a 

 century of intermittent efforts to mechanize the crop, most of them 

 doomed to failure. Cotton has long been one of our most labor- 

 requiring farm enterprises, and the annual gathering of the crop 

 has been an extremely burdensome and underpaid form of human 

 drudgery. The need to preserve a large low-wage labor force for this 

 purpose has been one of the roots of social difficulty in the South. 

 Why did it take so long to apply the familiar technique of labor-saving 

 invention to this vast regional enterprise? 



The question involves many considerations, but it is the purpose of 

 this paper to review only the technological aspect of the problem. 

 The history of inventions designed to mechanize the cotton harvest 

 is a peculiarly fascinating one because of the great variety of ap- 

 proaches tried out at one time or another, and the truly formidable 

 technical, economic, and social obstacles which had to be overcome 

 in order to find solutions. 



THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 



Cotton, unlike the small grains whose simple characteristics per- 

 mitted mechanization much earlier, is a distressingly difficult crop to 

 harvest by a uniform mechanical method. The crop is grown under 

 a considerable diversity of soil and climatic conditions, and the result- 

 ant plant varies from a scrubby knee-high bush to a rank, wide- 



1 Reprinted by permission from Agricultural History, vol. 31, No. 1, 1957. 



413 



