Abstract

Cotton harvesting/picking may be accomplish manually or mechanically using cotton picker. A manually operated cotton picker was developed and on-farm performance evaluation was carried out. The cotton picker was compared with the existing manually operated cotton picker, and the traditional method of harvesting cotton on the bases of time input, labour requirement, ground and plant harvest losses. Results indicate that labour requirement for the developed cotton picker; the existing cotton picker and manual cotton picker were 166.17, 173.8 and 93.3 man-hour-ha^-1 respectively. With their respective ground harvest losses of 15, 12 and 5% at the branch moisture content of 39.5% wet base and cotton moisture content of 2.8% wet bases. The study also indicates that time input, labour requirement, ground plant harvest losses were statistically significant at 5% level.

Key words:  Cotton picker, picking, efficiency, picking losses, manual.