Rubber-Tired Hoe

Still to achieve commercial importance is the extraordinary cotton-picking machine developed by the Rust brothers three years ago. Definitely a commercial success is another cotton machine with nearly as many social implications--the Dixie Cotton Chopper. Last week when several South American planters ordered cotton choppers, they could not be promised delivery sooner than next July, for Dixie Cultivator Corp. of Dallas was already working at capacity.

Cotton is planted in rows some three feet apart and when the plants are a few inches high they have to be thinned out into hills about twelve inches apart, two or three plants to a hill. Because it has always been done by hand labor with a hoe, this thinning is called "chopping." From April to June every year the South's cotton fields are full of an army of choppers, each doing about an acre a day. In 1920 a San Antonio jack-of-all-trades named Ellis Albaugh visited his brother-in-law at Seguin, Tex. The brother-in-law had a broken leg, and not enough choppers were available to work his cotton fields. So Ellis Albaugh built a crude machine which did it.

Not until last year was the mechanical cotton chopper good enough for commercial success. Today, it comes in two sizes, a one-row machine which can chop twelve acres a day, a two-row machine which will chop 25 when pulled by a team, four acres an hour when pulled by a tractor.

The mechanism is simple--a unit of rotating blades suspended beneath a two-wheel cart at right angles to the row. Each blade backs into the ground heel first as the machine trundles overhead, comes out point last, leaving the loose dirt in the hole but removing the surplus seedlings. Last year Dixie Cultivator Corp. sold 403 one-row choppers at $157.50 each. In 1938 it will turn out 2,500 machines, 60% of the two-row type.

But Ellis Albaugh shares not in this profit. He sold out for $600 cash. The promoters who bought it sold stock in the Dixie Cotton Chopper Co., then absconded with the money. One of the salesmen of this first company was a Kentuckian named Lawrence W. Leeper whose wife had an independent fortune. In 1927 Lawrence Leeper bought the rights to the chopper, patented it in 1932. Engineer Dent Parrett improved the machine and wealthy oldtime Rancher John Scharbauer and friends put up $200.000 to establish Dixie Cultivator Corp. in 1936. Lawrence Leeper retained a controlling interest and has given new stock to as many of the original company's stockholders as he could find. This week he and his wife were the guests of Manhattan's Commodity Club, which paid their expenses from Texas to hear them describe their "rubber-tired hoe with a seat on it."

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