So, human pickers would move through the fields trailing 10 foot long sacks that would weigh up to 100 pounds when full. Growers could not simply leave the early-maturing bolls on the plant until all had matured because the quality of the cotton deteriorated as soon as the bolls opened. The bolls on the plants would mature at different rates. Traditionally, cotton fields had to be picked by hand three and four times each harvest season. By then, they had come up with an updated model dubbed the "M-12-H."īefore IH's success, inventers and engineers tried various techniques to pull the cotton fibers from the mature boll, but the plant itself made it hard. Because of restrictions on steel, IH couldn't begin producing its cotton combine in quantity until 1948. Over the next 100 years, there were over 1,800 different patents issued for cotton harvesting schemes and none of them were successful until International Harvester built the Model "H-10-H" in 1942 in the middle of the war. The first attempts at a mechanical cotton picker or combine were patented as early as 1850. In fact, between 19, the rural black population in the South declined by 21 percent.Īs a result, cotton growers in the South, Southwest and California were all clamoring for a combine to harvest their crops. In the 20th century, both World Wars lured many black share croppers out of the fields and to defense jobs in the North. The labor required to grow cotton was one of the reasons that slavery (before the Civil War) and the share cropper system (after the Civil War) existed. history, cotton has been an extremely labor intensive crop to produce. That amounted to more than 16 million bales of raw cotton each bale weighing 600 pounds that were processed into thread, woven into cloth and then sewn into clothing or other fabric items. grew two-thirds of the cotton used in the world. One of the most important of those crops was cotton and the development of a mechanical harvester had far-reaching social consequences.
Cotton Harvesting during the 1950s and 60sĪs the technology for combines for wheat and corn developed, demand increased for combination harvesters for all crops.
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