Spindle-picking

Harvesting by means of strippers is practiced mainly in West Texas and the adjoining areas of Oklahoma and New Mexico. This method has also gained great Importance in the Coastal Bend area of Texas. Because a stripper harvester (whether a finger stripper or a brush stripper) removes almost all vegetative material from the plant (except for the central stem and major branches), about 1100 kg of harvested material are brought to the gin to yield one 218-kg bale of lint. The lint therefore is approximately one-third of the harvested material in spindle-picked cotton and can be as little as one-fifth in stripper-harvested cotton. 

A new gin for ginning spindle-picked cotton was constructed in the Mississippi Delta in 1977. The layout of the machinery, doors, and waste collecting system was designed to reduce worker and community exposure to airborne dust by optimizing functional area locations with respect to the prevailing winds from the southwest and northwest. Dust levels were measured in this gin (16) during the peak of the ginning period in 1979, and were found to be ... 

Once the plant is ready, the cotton is mechanically harvested with either a spindle picker or cotton stripper. The spindle picker selectively harvests seed cotton from open boUs. The unopened boUs are left on the plant and can be picked at a later date. The spindle picker uses a rotating tapered barbed spindle to remove the cotton from the bur (seed case). The seed cotton is wrapped around the spindle, pulled from the bur, removed from the spindle with a mbber doffer, and then transferred to a basket. 

Historically cotton bolls have been harvested by hand. More recently, however, the development of machine harvesters has reduced production costs. For efficient use of both types of pickers (the spindle type with rotating spindles that picks the cotton only from open bolls, and the stripper type which strips... 

Two major techniques have been used to study the dimension of chromosome fibers by electron microscopy. The first is the surface spreading method, in which the cells are spread on a water-air interphase, and all the intracellular components are dispersed. But the chromatin and the spindle remain close together and can be picked up on a grid, which can then be prepared for electron microscopic examination. The second technique is the thin-sectioning method. After fixation the tissue is embedded in plastic and cut less than 1000 A thick. Refer to specialized texts for descriptions of these techniques [119]. The important finding is that with the first method, the dimension of the fibers diameter is estimated to be 200-300 A, whereas it is only 80-180 A with the second. 

Oberling 1926, Pick 1933). In addition, osteoblasts and fibroblast-like spindle cells of the bone marrow (Block and Jacobson 1948) and adventitial cells and histiocytes store cerebrosides and become GC (Pick 1926). 

Hand picking is advantageous compared to machine picking, as only fibers from completely mature capsules are being collected. Usually, this cotton contains fewer plant contaminants. For automated picking, two kinds of harvest machines are used the stripper and the spindle picker. 

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