1938 USDA EDUCATIONAL FILM “ SAM FARMER’S COTTON ” AGRICULTURE AFRICAN AMERICAN FARMING XD31464

[@jeffreycoulter4095]

I love this old USDA films. So much history throughout the background.

[@PeriscopeFilm]

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[@SaltGrains_Fready]

We love this old history. IT's a gift from God 2 B able to preserve it for the subsequent generations who have no clue that this is how mankind worked and lived.

[@josephherrmann6304]

Thanks to this video I am ready to grow cotton.

[@snarky_user]

To think that during my parents' lifetimes this was considered modern farming.

[@nonyadamnbusiness9887]

I have to think there must be some process to take the static out of the soundtrack by now.

[@RustyCarnahan]

It's like trying to listen to a distant AM radio station

[@561ram]

God the audio on this....

[@lukestrawwalker]

Probably hasn't seen the light of day for 60 years... OL J R: )

[@jeffreycoulter4095]

You're lucky to see this. So turn down the treble

[@MoeLarrycurly1]

👍👍🚜

[@socialexperimentgaming4808]

T O B Y!!!!!

[@jatoav8or]

Holy crap, one row at a time and this was only two years before WW2. I feel sorry for Sam.

[@keithmoore5306]

as staticy as this is how can anyone watch it!!!!!

[@cool3865]

well excuse them for having bad film back in those days

[@jojohns1949]

lots of black and white folks working together

[@laserbeam002]

Yep...My family had a 65 acre cotton farm in the 30's and 40's. They hired black and white folks to help out. Everyone got along fine because they all knew each other because they all lived in the area and were, in many cases, neighbors.

[@thomaslucas6079]

When they got machines that picked it a lot of people lost jobs. It's slower and very hard work but what it cost to maintain machinery they could have paid people who needed the money to survive.

[@lukestrawwalker]

Cotton strippers had been around for a long time, basically fence rails (wooden staves) spaced close together to pull the bolls off the plants. BUT it was only useful on short cotton grown in places like the High Plains of Texas or other very arid environments. Cotton in the hot, humid, usually wet from rain South grew too tall for stripper harvesting, and of course fruited over a longer period of time, so not all the bolls were ready to be picked (or stripped) at the same time. Various designs for mechanical cotton pickers had been tinkered with for decades as well, but none had proven particularly practical... there were primitive hand vacuum pickers that sucked lint out of the bolls and various other mechanical techniques or designs that were tried, but what was the greatest impetus for actual technical development into a saleable product to get into the fields was the manpower shortage of World War 2. Much of the manpower used to hand produce cotton, the chopping and picking operations particularly, was drawn off to work in war factories to produce all the material needed for the war, and thus a labor shortage on the farm to do all the hand picking led International Harvester to come out with a mechanical cotton picker, which mounted on a reversed Farmall tractor. Of course only the largest farmers could afford them at first, as seen in this video most smaller, poorer farmers even in 1938 were still farming with horses and mules and using hand labor for most of the operations, or small horse-drawn one row implements. BUT mechanical picking of cotton had 'caught on' and over the next decade or so mechanical harvesting took over. My Grandpa refined aviation gasoline during World War 2, which was essential war work so he didn't have to go into the military. He talked my great-grandfather into letting him farm his land in the early-mid 50's. He farmed with a pair of small Ford tractors-- an NAA model called "Junkpile" and a newer overhead valve "Golden Jubilee" model 8N called "Jubilee". My great-Grandpa had the first tractor in the county, a Fordson, which took the place of the big Belgian or Percheron horses "Jim and Molly" who he had farmed with before that. Later he got a Farmall F-12 and then an F-20. Even in the mid 1950's, Grandpa and Grandma had to hire choppers and pickers to manually chop and pick the crop, though they did all their tillage, planting, and other operations on the farm using tractors and 2 row equipment. Sometime in the very late 50's or early 60's Grandpa got a Dearborn cotton stripper that would fit on the 8N Ford tractor, and used that to strip his cotton, and did a lot of custom work towing the machine around on a big trailer. The Dearborn stripper was a rather advanced stripper, using brushes and rubber flaps to strip the cotton off the plants, and vacuum suction to pull the stripped cotton up pipes to a cleaner then blowing it into the basket. Later on he got an IH one row cotton picker which was of course much more efficient, since it only picked open bolls and left the green bolls on the plants to open for the second pick or scrapping. Cotton back then was picked MANY times, even when I was a kid in the 70's and 80's we picked cotton at least twice, some times 3-4 times, depending how much was left in the field... if we could get a bale on 4 acres, we'd pick it. A bale on 5 acres, that was pretty thin and not really worth the fuel or time to pick it again. In the hand picking days, a neighbor of mine I baled hay for in the 90's who was about 90 himself, told me basically his Dad had their family picking cotton pretty much weekly from August to about Thanksgiving or so. Then he'd have them pick it one more time, and each kid could keep the money from the cotton they picked (that's what they were doing, weighing the cotton they'd picked before dumping it into the wagon) Then after it was ginned and sold he gave each kid their "Christmas money" from the last picking. He gave them the week off between Christmas and New Years, but then after New Years Day, it was hook up the rolling stalk chopper to the horses and start chopping stalks (as seen in the movie) to get ready for the next crop. Later! OL J R :)

[@NathanDudani]

Muh ludditetry

[@kq2799]

@@lukestrawwalker Good stuff, thank you for sharing!

[@snarky_user]

Give that cotton a serving of ARSENIC and molasses, with a side of MERCURY!

[@laserbeam002]

What the hell are you talking about???

[@snarky_user]

@@laserbeam002 did you watch the video? 11:17