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.
SPRAYING MACHINES
Nobody could possibly do by hand all of the spraying that protects farmers’ crops. Mechanical sprayers come in many shapes and sizes. The most usual sort for big fields travels along behind a tractor, shooting chemicals out from nozzles in a pipe that is twenty or thirty or even sixty feet wide.
Some of the special sprayers are queer looking machines. One of them has six squirmy arms, bent in different directions so that they get the chemicals underneath leaves and on top as well. The kind that sprays fruit trees pumps chemicals out of twelve pipes at once. It works so hard and fast that farmers call it a cyclone.
Then there is a sprayer that can be used for several different kinds of job. One day the farmer hitches it up to a tank near cattle pens. As the cattle walk down a narrow path between two fences, he sprays them with a chemical that kills bothersome insects. Next day, he may want to paint his fence. So he rigs the machine up differently and shoots paint onto the boards.
HOME WORK
All of this sounds as if everything that a farmer could need must have been invented by now. The fact is that there are new inventions coming along all the time, and farmers themselves make many of them. Every day in the week some farmer is likely to think up something he needs, then go to work making it. Here is a sample: