Cotton is a crop that has always taken an enormous amount of work. Even after cultivating machines were invented, men had to go through the fields twice every year and hoe out weeds around the plants by hand. One farmer rigged up a contraption that made hoeing easier. He hitched an air compressor to his tractor and ran hoses from the compressor to four special hoes. Then the escaping air jiggled the hoes in the men’s hands and saved the work of swinging them up and down.

Nowadays some of the big cotton farmers have an easier way of solving the problem. They just keep the weeds from growing in the first place. As the planting machine drops the cotton seeds, it spreads weed killer along each side of the row. This killer is a particular kind of chemical that keeps the weeds from sprouting, but it does not hurt the cotton. The only weeds that grow in the field come up between rows where it’s easy for a cultivator to scratch them under.

At cotton picking time, machines now do the work in many places. Cotton is ready to pick when the little round heads of white fluff called bolls break open. Not all the bolls on one plant burst at the same time. A man who picks by hand can tell by looking which ones are ready. Of course the machine doesn’t have eyes, but its tiny barbed steel fingers catch up only the opened bolls. The fingers are fixed on a turning drum. They pluck the cotton from the plant, carry it around to be pulled off and blown through a big pipe into a large basket behind the driver.

People have been trying for at least a hundred years to invent a perfect cotton picker, and they haven’t succeeded yet. The machines still can’t do as careful a job as skilled men and women can do by hand.