Present practices and future needs for mechanization of cotton picking in India*

Colton is an important commercial crop for India. Entire cotton in India is manually picked. Manual picking is not only labour-intensive operation but it involves a lot of human drudgery. Due to impending scarcity of labour, mechanization of cotton harvesting is of paramount importance. Two types of machines are commonly employed, i.e., pickers and strippers, Mechanical pickers are selective in that the seed cotton is removed from the open bolls, whereas green, unopened bolls are left on the plant to mature for subsequent picking. Strippers, on the other hand, are once-over machines. Spindle type pickers are usually designed for a row spacing of 97 to 102 cm. However, strippers are designed to operate at narrow row spacing. Some of the studies, conducted on the two systems of harvesting cotton, revealed that total trash content had been much more ill brush type strippers than spindle type pickers. Cotton harvested by brush strippers generally had higher moisture content than spindle type pickers.

Considering the cultural and agronomical practices and staggered blooming characteristics of Indian cotton plant, mechanical harvesters were not considered suitable for Indian conditions. As the biological scientists are gearing up to develop suitable plant types, amenable to mechanical harvesting, it is considered necessary to concentrate efforts on the introduction of mechanized cotton harvesting in India. It is recommended that a single or two row spindle type cotton picker may be imported for extensive evaluation and taking up further modification/improvements as warranted by local conditions in collaboration with some progressive manufacturers in the country.