I notice the cotton in season and begin to wonder about slaves and sharecroppers picking cotton before the advent of the mechanical one step harvester.
Would it have made more sense to cut all the plants down and transport them to one place where people were stripping them for their cotton instead of sending people out to pick the cotton with all those trips to a central “cotton unloading” area?
I mean, If you didn’t have to go anywhere you could stay put and pick cotton all day long, uninterrupted, while a small crew brought you the raw materials.
why did we send people far out into the field when it would have been more efficiant to bring the crop to the picker?
Oh yeah…
I’m guessing the growers would want to keep the plants growing.
YMMV of course.
I am not a cotton grower, but I did work in cotton fields briefly when I was in high school. It would not have been more efficient to cut down the plants and bring them to a central location. IIRC, cotton plants are pretty sturdy and “bushy,” it would be very labor intensive to pull them up or chop them down and drag them to the wagon, then unload them at a central picking point.
In addition, judging from pictures I have seen, cotton plants used to be a lot taller and bushier than they are now. It would have been difficult to load just a few of these big 7-10 ft. high bushes into a horsedrawn wagon to take a slow ride to a central picking point to get the cotton off of them, and then have to take a slow ride all the way back to the field to get a few more plants, then have to take a slow ride to get the cotton to the gin (I am assuming that the gin is off the farmer’s property). It would have been much easier to send pickers with bags down the rows and then load the important stuff into the wagons and then go directly to the gin. The rest of the plant’s volume could be left in the field to be destroyed before the next season.
In Texas, I believe that farmers have to destroy each season’s plants by a government mandated deadline date and start new each year. I believe that this is to prevent insects and diseases from making through the winter to next season.
They picked cotton the way they did because they would have been killed if they had said no. That’s a pretty powerful motivator.
The slavemasters made their slaves pick cotton they way they did because they could kill them if they said no. That’s the power they had.
I suspect it didn’t go any deeper than that. There’s no reason to deviate from the way you pick every other crop if you yourself aren’t out there getting your fingers cut up by the bolls, and there’s no way to deviate from what the master tells you to do if you wish to live to see tomorrow.
Derleth, I know WHY the slaves were oh so kind enough to pick the cotton…I’m asking the question that chriscya answered.
Around here, they’re pretty small plants, but I guess you’re right about not being able to cram too many onto a wagon. Thanks.
I’m not talking from experience of the actual cotton farming industry here, but generally speaking, one of the significant factors in making mechanical harvesting viable is the development of modern cultivars with a very short cropping period.
If your cotton bolls are produced gradually over the course of, say, a month, you can either pick them by hand, passing over the plants many times, or harvest them mechanically, destroying the plants and losing potential future yield.
If your variety produces the whole crop more or less at once, you can harvest mechanically and lose nothing by destroying the plants.
However, cutting down the entire plants then transporting them to a sorting/picking area probably wouldn’t have worked for other reasons - you’d probably end up with a fairly compacted mass of vegetation from which it would be harder to extract the useful parts, plus you’re handling/moving more material, which is always going to be a drawback.