Clarksdale, Mississippi
January 3, 2008
By Bob Ratliff,
Mississippi State University
Ag Communications
 Covered only with a coat of rust and adorned with a string of
lights from a Christmas past, the vintage machine sitting on the
edge of Highway 49 near Clarksdale is a reminder of a revolution
that took place in southern agriculture more than 60 years ago.
The M12H International Harvester cotton picker was produced in
the late 1940s and was among the second generation of
commercially successful cotton pickers to hit the market. It is
located on the Hopson Plantation, the site of field tests for
mechanical pickers from the 1920s through the 1940s.
Picking cotton by hand was a sunup to sundown job, and a good
picker could harvest about 250 to 275 pounds of cotton a day.
About 1,200 pounds of hand-picked cotton is needed to produce a
500-pound bale of cleaned, dried lint ready for market.
“The long hours of back-breaking hand labor needed to produce
cotton led to a lot of interest in mechanical pickers as far
back as 1850,” said Mississippi State University Extension
Service agricultural engineer Herb Willcutt. “The first known
patent for a cotton picker was issued to S.S. Rembert and
Jebediah Prescott of Memphis in 1850.”
During the years that followed, engineers experimented with
machines that removed cotton from bolls in a variety of ways,
including the use of vacuum pumps to suck out the lint. Machines
using spindles to separate lint from bolls proved the most
successful.
“These machines use rows of barbed spindles rotating at high
speed to remove the cotton from the plant. The cotton is then
removed from the spindles by a counter-rotating cylinder called
a doffer,” Willcutt said.
The Mississippi Delta was a popular testing ground for
mechanical pickers because of its location in the heart of the
nation’s Cotton Belt, the large number of acres devoted to
cotton production in the region and the location of U.S.
Department of Agriculture scientists at the Delta Branch
Experiment Station.
By the late 1920s, several companies, including John Deere and
International Harvester, or IH, had research and development
plans for mechanical pickers and were getting close to
commercial production.
Economics, however, dealt their projects a serious blow.
“The 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression dropped
cotton prices to just 5 cents a pound and brought development of
mechanical pickers to a standstill,” Willcutt said. “However, IH
resumed work on its tractor-mounted pickers in the early 1930s.”
Testing of the IH machines and machines produced by the Rust
Cotton Picker Co. in Memphis took place at the Delta Branch
throughout the 1930s, and IH sent engineers and prototype
pickers to the Hopson Plantation.
A 1936 demonstration of the Rust tractor-pulled mechanical
picker at the Delta Branch triggered an editorial in the Jackson
Daily News stating that the machine “should be driven right out
of the cotton fields and sunk into the Mississippi River,” out
of fear that it would put millions of people out of work.
At the Hopson Plantation, IH engineers from the company’s
Chicago headquarters were able to troubleshoot problems as they
developed.
“The first pickers didn’t have a dump basket, and the cotton had
to be unloaded to a wagon by hand,” said Walter Nance, a member
of the Hopson family who grew up on the plantation during the
1940s. “One day, the engineers came in exhausted from unloading
a picker basket, and they sat down under a tree and designed a
dump basket. They took their plans back to Chicago, and when
they came back the next fall they had a mechanical dump basket.”
While the IH engineers were working at the Hopson Plantation,
USDA and Mississippi State researchers at the Delta Branch were
studying mechanical pickers and conducting research on
strengthening cotton fibers to withstand mechanical harvesting.
The Delta Branch also was the site of research with defoliation,
which was needed to remove the leaves from cotton plants before
mechanical harvesting.
The work at the Delta Branch Experiment Station and at the
Hopson Plantation led to commercial production of IH mechanical
pickers, while war-time demand for factory workers was easing
concern about the impact of replacing much of the South’s farm
workforce with machines.
In 1942, IH produced 12 mechanical pickers on Model H Farmall
tractors, and in 1943, 13 more were mounted on the Model H
tractors and one on a larger Model M. Production increased to 40
of the machines for use on Model M tractors for the 1944 crop.
Also in 1944, the Hopson Plantation produced the first cotton
crop using just mechanical cultivation and harvesting, a feat
that made the farm a tourist attraction.
“They’ve come from all over the Cotton Belt,” said Dick Hopson,
one of the two brothers operating the plantation at the time, in
a 1944 interview for ACCO Press, a cotton magazine. “Men from
the eastern mills, bankers, in fact, just about every phase of
the cotton business has been represented in those who have come
to observe the picking operation this year.”
Also in 1944, the Delta Branch used an IH mechanical picker to
harvest its cotton crop, marking the first time the experiment
station successfully produced a cotton crop without a single
hour of hand labor.
The move to mechanization also spelled the end of mule power at
the facility. In 1945, a new mule barn housed 40 mules, but by
1950, only one remained at the station.
Engineers had produced a machine that could pick cotton of
comparable quality to hand picking and at a faster pace,
concerns remained about the economics of mechanical harvesting.
“They had a production model that was satisfactory, but it still
had to be proved that this was a practical, economic thing,”
Nance said. “So, the plantation had three bookkeepers with the
most extensive cost accounting setup known to man at the time.
Every nut, every bolt, every quart of oil, everything was
accounted for in order to compare mechanical production to the
hand labor used in the sharecropping system. They did prove that
mechanical farming was economically practical.”
Mechanized production of cotton and other crops increased after
World War II. A significant step forward was John Deere’s 1951
volume manufacturing of two-row cotton pickers. Today, six-row
machines are the standard, but they still operate on the
engineering principles developed more than 60 years ago.
“Current cotton pickers still use most of the concepts
introduced in the
1943 IH production pickers,” Willcutt said. “However, one
six-row harvester operating at 4.2 miles an hour in
two-plus-bales-per-acre cotton can harvest 150 to 200 bales of
high-quality fiber a day with a crew of three or four people. It
would take 750 to 1,000 people to harvest the same amount by
hand.”
The Hopson Plantation has been designated a Mississippi Landmark
for the role played there in the development of mechanical
cotton harvesting.
The M12H picker parked near the plantation’s former commissary
is part of Delta history, said James Butler, who along with his
wife, Cathy, a member of the Hopson family, own the area that
served as the plantation’s headquarters. The commissary building
is now a blues club, and former sharecropper houses and the gin
building on the property are part of an inn that draws visitors
from around the world.
“We would like to eventually restore the machine to the way it
was in the 1940s when the plantation was part of important
changes in Delta life,” he said. |
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