picker

A picker is a farm machine designed to harvest crops, most notably corn and cotton. For corn, mechanical pickers snap ears from the stalk, harvesting only the grain and cobs. These machines use counter-rotating rollers to pull stalks through and snap off the ears, with a separate mechanism to remove husks. For cotton, there are two main types: strippers, which remove the entire plant's bolls, leaves, and stems, and spindle pickers that remove cotton from open bolls, leaving the bur on the plant. While early versions existed in the mid-19th century, practical and widely accepted mechanical pickers for both crops emerged much later.12