OCR Text |
Show Machinery Is Revamping Farming in Cotton Belt Nearly a million tractors today are in action on farms In the 18 cotton - producing states, saving time and labor in nearly every phase of cotton production. The invasion of machinery into the South's white cotton fields Is elim inating the back-breaking task ol producing the cotton crop. Man's mechanical helpers achieve in a few hours what formerly took days of costly human labor. For example, the flame cultivator, attached at-tached to a tractor, removes grass and weeds from the field at one-tenth one-tenth the former cost. An experiment in the coastal plains area of North Carolina showed that while 118 man hours are required to produce an acre ol cotton by the old man-mule methods, meth-ods, use of two-row tractor equipment, equip-ment, mechanical choppers, flame . cultivators and machine pickers cuts the man-hour requirements to 19.7 per acre. Machines capable of harvesting a bale of cotton in slightly more than an hour are now a reality 1 n s t ea d of a remote possibility. While the average hand-picker gathers about 15 pounds of seed cotton an hour, a single mechanical picker in the same field harvests about 1.500 pounds in 2 hours, 20 minutes. Thus, the mechanical harvester accomplishes the work of 40 to 50 human pickers. |