People who were ready and waiting forked the cotton onto trucks with iron pitchforks. Once loaded, the trucks hauled it to the Cotton Gin.
The original plan had been to harvest five hundred mu, but Xie Yundong figured that since this thing worked so quickly and cleanly, they might as well do more. Of the two thousand mu Liang Dacheng managed for the Cooperative, a thousand were turned over entirely to the Cotton Picker.
The people watching the Cotton Picker at work included not only interested members of the Team, but also teachers, students, and Odd Jobs working nearby picking cotton.
At first, some students had wanted to pick this patch when they saw all that white cotton, but Xie Yundong had turned them down, explaining that it had been specially treated with Cotton-Boll Opening Agent and defoliant for machine harvesting.
The students, teachers, and Odd Jobs hired by nearby farmers were curious, too. They wanted to see how machine cotton picking worked.
After all, it was something new to most of them.
The machine-picked cotton fields were clearly distinct from those harvested by hand. At a glance, the plants in the machine-harvested fields held nothing but white cotton. In the hand-picked fields, the plants still had green and brown leaves and green cotton bolls. There was plenty of white cotton, too, but it did not cover the entire plant.
The difference was considerable.
When the Cotton Picker entered the field, the teachers, students, and Odd Jobs all stood up to watch. The bare stalks it left behind astonished every one of them.
Some even came over to ask Xie Yundong whether, with Cotton Pickers, they would no longer need students and Odd Jobs to pick cotton.
Xie Yundong explained that they were still experimenting. It would be a long