* Department of Farm Power and Machinery, PAD, Ludhiana-141004.
In India cotton picking is done manually all over the country while in other countries like USA, Russia etc. mechanical cotton picking is widely practiced. Attempt to introduce a Russian cotton picker during 1988 in India failed due to lack of suitable cotton variety and large machine size. Therefore during 2000–2004 experiments were conducted to study the plant characteristics of some cotton varieties in the context of mechanical picking. Defoliation studies were conducted to study the effectiveness of defoliant Dropp (thidiazuron 50 WP) in leaf shedding. Preliminary field assessment of an imported two-row mechanical picker was carried out in Punjab during 2003 the performance of the picker was quite encouraging but the machine was too big and costly to be adopted under Indian condition.
