A blazing sun beat down one day last week on the Mississippi delta cotton fields as hundreds of white-shirted, straw-hatted plantation owners, managers, ginners, dealers, bankers, scientists and Government men thronged to a private farm designated by the Delta Experiment Station at Stoneville. For many a month they had heard and talked a great deal about the cotton-picking machine invented by John Daniel Rust and his brother Mack
(TIME, April 22, 1935). Last week, guzzling Coca-Cola by the barrel in a quivering, dust-laden haze, they witnessed the first public demonstration of the Rust picker.
Pulled by a snorting Deere tractor, the machine moved back & forth at 3 m.p.h. along the 300-yd. rows of plants. Smooth wet spindles combed into the plants, caught the white tufts from open bolls. From the spindles the cotton was mechanically stripped and blown into a collecting bag. Hour after hot hour the spindle-belts droned on like a swarm of bees. Bag after bellying bag poured out its load in a white cascade. Spectators crowded around to finger and scrutinize mechanically picked cotton.
Proud and sweating at the machine's controls was Mack Rust, who handled most of the technical problems in developing the picker. Brother John, who first conceived the principle, had gone to Russia. The USSR had bought two of the ten machines which the brothers have so far manufactured, and John Rust went along with the shipment to show Communist agriculturists how to run them.
For the welter of enthusiasm and disparagement that resulted from last week's show, a few facts stood out clearly. Under favorable conditions, the Rust picker does pick cotton fast and cheaply. It costs $1 per hour to run. In one hour last week it picked 400 Ib.—as much as one average hand-picker could gather in four days. It does not injure the plants. But it does need a high-yield stand to do its best; the yield on the Stoneville farm was estimated close to a bale to the acre, whereas the national average is about one-third of a bale to the acre. The machine knocks some cotton to the ground, leaves some open bolls unpicked. It takes up more leaves and trash than Negro pickers do.
There was no scientific measurement at last week's demonstration. Estimates of how much of the cotton the machine picked the first time over a row varied from 50% to 75%, the second time 80% to 95%. Estimates of how much the reduction in grade, caused by trash, leaves and possible stain, would lop off the grower's return ranged from $3 to $7 per bale. Frequently heard was the opinion that, even if the machine were practical on huge, flat, high-yield tracts, it would do poorly on small plots, on hilly ground, on low-yield acreage. Sample comment:
Pat Barcroft, Mississippi grower: "I don't want one—it wastes too much cotton and gets too much trash."
W. H. Hutchins, Mississippi grower: "It is a greater success than I had expected. Now we won't have to beg for labor to help pick cotton."
Edison Collins Westbrook, Georgia University of Agriculture professor: "I am reserving my opinion. . . ."
William E. Ayres, manager of the Delta Experiment Station: "It isn't a finished machine, but the Rusts are on the right track."