Blytheville, Ark. had never seen so many folks before. On Ross Hughes’s farm there were 15,000 of them—come from as fur away as Texas to see the first annual cotton-picking championship of the U. S.

A cotton picker is a complex piece of agricultural equipment made up of hundreds of components that must work together precisely. When one part wears out or fails, finding the correct replacement ...

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 ...

There’s a lot going on when it comes to maintaining the heads on a cotton picker. The picking unit has dozens of spinning parts working at high speeds, and they all depend on tight tolerances to keep ...