Here's a video of my 1975 860. I let another guy from the crew run it for a bit while I shot some footage. It's not the best, and I had him strip a little slower than usual so I could keep up without shaking the camera too much, although I don't know if that did much good, as it's still a little shaky at times. 

Maybe one too many https:// ?

How tall is the cotton?  I grew some when I worked in Peru, and it was about 4 ft tall.  This looks to be a lot shorter?

Reindeer, ideally it's just over knee high, but it varies field to field. The day after I filmed that we were in some bottom ground and that stuff was pretty tall, just over waist high on me. The broadcast headers the Allis machines use are primarily for short cotton, although with the right mods I've heard of them stripping cotton 5' tall. That's not much fun though, as the reels tend to break the tall stalks apart, and running the whole plant through the machine isn't very efficient. You can remove the front reel for tall cotton, as well as remove some of the reel fingers to make the stripping less aggressive in the tall cotton. Usually in SW Oklahoma though we are short on water, so the plants don't get that tall anyway. 

The field in the video was very sorry, and full of waist-high tumbleweeds. We found one clean spot for filming. The guy that farms it needs a cultivator I guess. We got the job because the first custom crew composed of new $750,000 Deere strippers couldn't strip it with all the weeds. They use row unit headers and weeds plug them up bad. The reels on these broadcast headers kinda chop the weeds up and they usually go through the machine alright. 

If we were stripping this field in October like it should've been done, the field would be stripped perfectly clean. By now a lot of the lint is stringing out of the bolls and falling on the ground. 

The machine is real nice. I haven't learned the whole story yet, but I basically bought it from a guy who bought it from the original owner, then used it one season, and decided he wanted a newer Deere. To each their own. 

Quite a bit of paint is still in the header, as well as the trash discharge chutes, which marks it as a low hour machine. That's very rare for such an old machine. Most 860s were rode hard, put away wet, and are now sitting in fence rows. I only know of 3 other running 860s in the state, but 880s are more plentiful. I need to find out the rest of the story and why it wasn't used much over the last 44 years. 

Haha! I wish, but no. We don't get paid until the cotton is picked up from the field, taken to the cotton gin, and ginned out. So could be this summer, as the local gins are all backed up with months of work. After they remove the rest of the foreign matter and seeds from the cotton, we get a report back on how many clean lint pounds there are, and we get paid according to that. 

Cotton strippers. 

The ether system? PO installed it. 

A cotton picker is. Cotton strippers are common.

A stripper strips (hence the name) everything off the stalk, leaving just bare branches. A picker only picks the lint, leaving the burrs, leaves, etc. behind. A picker yields a cleaner product, but has an overwhelming number of parts per row unit and costs a lot more to operate and maintain. 

Allis explains the two pretty well in these videos. 

Cotton picker

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wVgpPFu9rc" rel="nofollow - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wVgpPFu9rc

Cotton Stripper. Early on there were 2 types...one with and without the burr extractor. Shortly after this film was made the burr extractor became standard equipment, because they do such a good job of cleaning the cotton. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87JWqCG9iZY" rel="nofollow - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87JWqCG9iZY

I'm not sure how much was left, probably a couple bales on the ground (a bale is 500 lb), and cotton is selling about 68 cents/lb, so maybe $680 worth. That's $68 we as custom harvesters lost, so not bad. 

We don't charge more when it's on the ground, the producer just loses out. 

They used to have a machine called a Rood that would go along and pick up cotton lying between the rows in much the same way a baler picks up hay. Never seen one in person, though, just internet photos. They worked alright I guess, but they also picked up whatever else trash was on the ground, which was one reason they fell out of popularity. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA8UNix5nBQ&t=0s&index=2&list=LL-IQUxMxb9SHRf4vdPMLaMw" rel="nofollow - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA8UNix5nBQ&t=0s&index=2&list=LL-IQUxMxb9SHRf4vdPMLaMw

Yep! 

Anyway, here's the new video. The new content starts at the 0:40 mark

very informative