Picker Problems

A blazing sun beat down one day last week on the Mississippi delta cotton fields as hundreds of white-shirted, straw-hatted plantation owners, managers, ginners, dealers, bankers, scientists and Government men thronged to a private farm designated by the Delta Experiment Station at Stoneville. For many a month they had heard and talked a great deal about the cotton-picking machine invented by John Daniel Rust and his brother Mack

(TIME, April 22, 1935). Last week, guzzling Coca-Cola by the barrel in a quivering, dust-laden haze, they witnessed the first public demonstration of the Rust picker.

Pulled by a snorting Deere tractor, the machine moved back & forth at 3 m.p.h. along the 300-yd. rows of plants. Smooth wet spindles combed into the plants, caught the white tufts from open bolls. From the spindles the cotton was mechanically stripped and blown into a collecting bag. Hour after hot hour the spindle-belts droned on like a swarm of bees. Bag after bellying bag poured out its load in a white cascade. Spectators crowded around to finger and scrutinize mechanically picked cotton.

Proud and sweating at the machine's controls was Mack Rust, who handled most of the technical problems in developing the picker. Brother John, who first conceived the principle, had gone to Russia. The USSR had bought two of the ten machines which the brothers have so far manufactured, and John Rust went along with the shipment to show Communist agriculturists how to run them.

For the welter of enthusiasm and disparagement that resulted from last week's show, a few facts stood out clearly. Under favorable conditions, the Rust picker does pick cotton fast and cheaply. It costs $1 per hour to run. In one hour last week it picked 400 Ib.--as much as one average hand-picker could gather in four days. It does not injure the plants. But it does need a high-yield stand to do its best; the yield on the Stoneville farm was estimated close to a bale to the acre, whereas the national average is about one-third of a bale to the acre. The machine knocks some cotton to the ground, leaves some open bolls unpicked. It takes up more leaves and trash than Negro pickers do.

There was no scientific measurement at last week's demonstration. Estimates of how much of the cotton the machine picked the first time over a row varied from 50% to 75%, the second time 80% to 95%. Estimates of how much the reduction in grade, caused by trash, leaves and possible stain, would lop off the grower's return ranged from $3 to $7 per bale. Frequently heard was the opinion that, even if the machine were practical on huge, flat, high-yield tracts, it would do poorly on small plots, on hilly ground, on low-yield acreage. Sample comment:

Pat Barcroft, Mississippi grower: "I don't want one--it wastes too much cotton and gets too much trash."

W. H. Hutchins, Mississippi grower: "It is a greater success than I had expected. Now we won't have to beg for labor to help pick cotton."

Edison Collins Westbrook, Georgia University of Agriculture professor: "I am reserving my opinion. . . ."

William E. Ayres, manager of the Delta Experiment Station: "It isn't a finished machine, but the Rusts are on the right track."

Archibald Franklin Toler, Mississippi manager: "I hope it doesn't work."

Co-inventor Mack Rust: "We don't claim that this is the best possible cotton picker. But this machine today is a better cotton picker than the old Model T Ford was an automobile when it was first offered."

Oscar Johnston is the bulky, crinkle-eyed manager of the British-owned Delta & Pine Land Co.. whose 10,000-acre cotton plantation is the largest in the world. This year Mr. Johnston is getting 575 Ib. to the acre of "strict middling" cotton which he sells at a premium over the market price. He gets along well with his 3,000 Negroes, wants to keep them. Newshawks therefore crowded around him last week to hear what he thought of the mechanical menace. Grower Johnston was skeptical but not scornful.

"The machine seems to be basically practical," said he, "but it needs improvements. To be successful, I believe it would require close co-operation among the machine's sponsors, the cotton growers and ginners. IF it is successful, it will be the death knell for family-size farms and for tenants."

One thing of which there was no doubt last week was that the cotton-growing South is excited about the Rust cotton-picker. The Memphis Press-Scimitar and a few other newspaoers were enthusiastic. Most Southern papers, however, declared in effect that even if the picker were good they would not like it. The Memphis Commercial-Appeal printed a cartoon of a pop-eyed old darky trailing an empty cotton-sack and exclaiming: "Ef'n it doose mah wuk--whose wuk I gwine do?" The Jackson, Miss. Daily News, unimpressed by the fact that the Rust brothers are conscientious Socialists and have promised to cushion the impact of the machine on Negro labor, advocated sinking the picker in the Mississippi River, together with its plans and specifications. In Tennessee, which still has antiEvolution laws on its books. Democratic National Committeeman Edward Hull Crump, boss of Memphis (TIME, Aug. 17), predicted that an anti-Picker statute could be passed in his State.

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