What are the rates of a harvester vs picking cotton by hand?

How much would a cotton shirt cost today if we had slaves vs using machinery?

What are the rate differences (machine/human) for corn, wheat?

I would expect that in the next ~20 years that robots will be picking most crops. Maybe not walking around robots, but picking grabbers on the front of a tractor that can detect ripe fruit by color.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43816207

https://www.technologyreview.com/20...-vision-to-harvest-fruit-in-new-zealand/

too late

I dont know but I can tell you that everytime I drive by a mechanically harvested field with my dad, he shakes his head and tells me that his dad, my grandfather, who is long past, would be sick to see all that cotton left in the field and would've beat his and his brothers butts if they had ever left a field like that when they were growing up and picking by hand.

Yep, but on average, they prob weren't picking 200#/ac. No way they could pull the 1000-1500# we make now. It'd never get done. And what's left ain't near as much as it looks.

No comparison....as we now know.....mechanical is a LOT less expensive and a LOT more productive over the long haul.

How did the cotton, peanut and bean crops do in southeast Alabama after Hurricane Sally?

Saw some cotton fields in south Montgomery Country that looked beaten to death.

Cotton south of Andalusia had not been defoliated yet and it still looked pretty bad when I went through there last weekend. I dont know why, we only got 25" of rain. The peanuts I saw looked like they had handled it pretty well. Better than I expected.

Appears those machines’ operating cost vs production rate beats out $15 an hour or even less headcount costs.

Any of yall ever watch a stripper (not a woman) harvest cotton . It gets ever thing . I watched one years ago go across the field. Turned out soom trashy cotton . I've never saw but that one

I bet I have heard "Look at all that cotton those machines left behind" 100 times. That cracks me up to hear that others hear the same thing.

And the tags left out there y’all talking about after a picker runs ain’t got quality for shucks most the time. Mechanical beats hand picked all day and twice on Sunday

Raise your hand if you have ever hand picked cotton. I have. Also remember riding on a cotton sack as a small child.

We moved from Colbert County to East Tennessee in 1974. One of the first questions I was asked was, using her words, "Do they still use blacks to pick cotton?". I replied "Yes, but now they drive $100,000 cotton pickers".

Now- I just knew racism would rear its ugly head here.

My post may come across to you as racist (in 2020), but when the conversation happened, there were no feelings of racism. She was simply curious because of Alabama’s reputation. I was simply answering her question. We moved from a house in the middle of cotton fields on Ricks Lane. Most of the men the farmers employed were black. I was simply answering her question. I was 14 at the time. Funny how times change. A simple conversation 46 years ago is now deemed racist.

I totally understood your reply.

I had to pick some test plots in college by hand. Their was 2 differ types one had green lint and the other had brown. They didn’t want it contaminated in the picker so us workers had to pick it by hand.

Farmer I worked for had people all the time tell him that his picker left to much. He always told them he would make a deal with them. They could go and hand pick what was left and he would split it with them. He never had anyone take him up on it. Lol

Hand up. Also plowed behind a mule, pulled and stacked peanuts by hand but worse to me was picking butterbeans and shelling by hand till thumbs bleed.

Picked some by hand. Got to ride in my grandfather's wagon full of cotton pulled by mules to the gin.