Cotton Pickers
- These John Deere cotton pickers are self-propelled machines
- They remove cotton lint and seeds from the plant
- Some of these machines can pick up to six rows of cotton at a time
- There are two types of pickers in use today
STRIPPER PICKER
- The stripper picker [1] is primarily used in Texas.
- It removes lint from the plant and much of the vines and other foreign matter.
- The vines and foreign matter are heavier than the lint, so they fall through cracks in the machine.
- The lint is then stored in a basket on the back of the picker.
SPINDLE PICKER
- Another type of picker is called the spindle picker[2]:
- Barbed spindles rotate very fast and remove seed-cotton from the plant.
- Then, a doffer[3] that rotates the opposite way, picks the cotton off of the barbed spindles.
- The cotton is then blown into a basket on the back of the machine.
- Once the basket is full the picker dumps the seed-cotton into a module builder[4]. The module builder creates a "brick" of seed-cotton that weighs about 21,000 lbs.
- These huge bricks are stored in the field or in the gin yard[5] until it is ginned.
- Once the brick is ginned, each bail weighs about 480 lbs.