Picking cotton by hand

A picker dragged a long sack down the row and was paid by weight, work done by whole families across the Mississippi Delta from August into December. The Hopson Planting Company near Clarksdale brought in a cotton crop with no hand labour at all in 1944, and hand picking was effectively over in the South by the late 1960s. The order of cause runs against the usual account, since the Great Migration was decades old and more than six million people had already left the South by 1950, so the loss of hands is what pushed planters toward the machine rather than the reverse. What stayed human is the decision of when to defoliate and when to run the machine, the ginning judgment on grade and staple length, and hand picking itself in parts of India and West Africa where holdings are too small for a picker to pay.