College of Agricultural Engineering, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana-141004.
* Based on the paper presented during Indo-Uzbekistan workshop on Agricultural Research, held at CIAE Bhopal during Nov. 15-16, 1999.
Manual harvesting/picking of cotton is quite a labour intensive operation Mechanical harvesting of cottin is widely used in USA, USSR, Egypt, etc. Machines used for cotton harvesting were basically of two types. These were either of stripper or picker type. The varietal requirement for these two types of machines were somewhat different. Both these rypes of machines require the cotton variety with compact sympodial/semi-sympodial plants with synchronized boll opening. A Russian design of mechanical cotton picker was evaluated in Punjab which did not gave the desired performance due to varietal performance and field conditions.
