Upon returning from my tree-limb harvesting, I stopped at a newer cotton harvesting filed I'd stopped earlier. The previously pictured hydraulic method requires at least three machines; the picker and at least two tractors plus the hydraulic contraption. This process is well developed but has been used for a couple of decades.
The newer method requires only the picker and one tractor. Of course, the picker is slightly more expensive! It can easily cost $725,000(us). The tractor is larger and can run over $130,000 plus another ~$10,ooo for the lift mechanism. Again, farming is an expensive gamble not for the faint of heart! While the minimum equipment will run over a million dollars, you won't know exactly what your crop will pay, assuming you didn't lose any of it to bad weather before you could get it out of the field!
This machine eliminates the need for the tractor pulling the
hydraulic bin and the
tractor pulling
the cart transferring the picked cotton to it.
Those two tractors, the bin and the cart are replaced by one slightly larger tractor and the 'lift'.
That one tractor moves the rolls to a location for the gin's truck to pick up later (four at a time).
The left over cotton plants serve as a breeding ground for parasitic nematodes, so the stalks need to be throughly chopped up to make sure they don't keep growing and feeding the parasites. This farmer uses another tractor to do the job at the same day of harvest, but he could easily have used the same tractor that was moving the rolls, saving $130,000?
I made a video with my iPhone, but it is even worse than the still images above. I found a fairly short YouTube vid that does a great job of showing <
this kind of cotton picker in action>. It shows how much faster things happen when the picker no longer needs to stop to dump its load in the cart that would then take it to the hydraulic bin in my first images. And it drives through the field at an astounding 5+ miles an hour! Its really not just a 'cotton' picker any more! And I've been told there are several mini-computers in these things monitoring so many functions/conditions/operations.
