When you are looking at farming equipment, you might run across several names in this business as well as unusual farming equipment. If you are curious about the more unusual stuff, here are some examples. You might even find some of these very useful.

The Cotton Picker/Cotton Module Builder

This bizarre-looking machine is worth its weight in gold to cotton growers. Its many forked teeth on the front scoop up the cotton plants, removing the buds of cotton, and sending the cotton through to a bundling machine on the back. As you might expect, it is not easy taking tiny balls of raw cotton and turning it into a "module." It requires hundreds of picked cotton "flowers" and takes several passes through a cotton field to accumulate. However, it beats picking all of the cotton buds by hand and trying to module them without a machine's help. 

Crawler Tractors

Rather than rely on just four wheels, these particular tractors have four sets of "crawler" tracks that move around a set of wheels in a triangular form. Some have just the crawler tracts on back, too. The benefit to driving one of these tractors is that there is less chance for tractor wheels to get stuck in soft mud and sink down to the point where you need a second tractor to pull the first out of the mud. The crawler tracks cannot sink, and therefore the tractor can keep going even in the wettest, sloppiest, muddiest conditions. 

Windrowers

What these machines do does not quite seem to match their name, until you puzzle it all together. They are essentially a harvesting machine for grain that cuts the grain, but rather than harvesting, threshing, and collecting the grain, they leave the stalks with the grain on the ground for a thresher to come through later. They are most commonly used by oat and barley farmers, but they can be used by wheat farmers as well. The rows of grain stalks they create are impervious to the wind, so the stalks and grains can't be blown around. A windrower is not recommended for corn farmers because the stalks are too tall and too dense for windrowers to mow through. Windorowers most closely resemble tractor mowers in appearance, but their functions are very different.

If you would like to learn more about these machines and other pieces of farming equipment, contact an agricultural manufacturer in your area.

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