Why was cotton a labor-intensive crop in antebellum Georgia?

Question

In the early days... About 1790s

Answer 1

There was virtually no machinery available at that time to perform any of the tedious chores associated with picking and or procession the cotton bolls.

Whitney's cotton gin was starting to gain acceptance in about the time frame you refer to i.e. 1790's.........that helped with the processing of the raw bolls -but- hand picking was still labor intensive.

In reality, and across the board, all agricultural picking/processing was tedious and labor intensive in all parts of the country where farming was done.

In SW Michigan where I live, picking berries is still a pain for growers that don't have a "shaker." (A huge device that literly
"shakes/rattles" the berries from thier vine or shrub.)

Answer 2

In antebellum georgia the key staple crop before the war was cotton. There are two types of cotton long staple (less labor intensive, but hard to grow in climate), and short staple(can grow in many more places). Cotton was generally short staple and removing the seeds was very difficult, and took long hours, however there was a new invention called the cotton gin, invented by eli whitney. This helped extract the seeds from the cotton in shorter time, but the process still took a very long time.

Answer 3

Because the bolls of cotton contain a lot of seeds that had to be separated from the cotton fibers by hand....up until Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin in 1793. At best one person, using "cotton picking" hands could separate out 3 pounds of cotton after a full day of work. Very slow and labor intensive.

Answer 4

The cotton had to be picked by hand in order to preserve the plant so it could grow more cotton. There was no machine that could do this. In fact I'm not even sure if there is one now...

Either way it had to be done by hand, and since it was a major staple in the economy of the south they wanted to do it quickly, which meant more labour.

Answer 5

lol cotton was very difficult to harvest, due to the many seeds that were needed to be taken out. Thats why white owners used slaves because they could do work for looonngg hours with little or no pay. then when cotton gin was invented, the population of cotton went way up and white plantation owners needed more and more slaves to make it go EVEN faster
=D
we're studying this in my s.s. class

Answer 6

No machines were around to do the work, so that the cotton was picked by hand. If you've ever seen a cotton field, ready for picking, you would understand how tough it was for the pickers.

Answer 7

well the cotton had to be hand picked,the seeds were very sticky.and the "cotton gin was" not yet invented.http://www.eliwhitney.org/cotton.htm
this site may all so help ya out some more.

Answer 8

There were no machines to process the cotton--the bolls had to be removed from the plants by hand and the seeds manually picked from them, along with any dirt and insects. Bad news for anyone with carpal tunnel syndrome.

Answer 9

In Georgia, it was "labor" intensive not "Labour" intensive. Because the cotton Gin was not yet invented and everything was done by hand.

Answer 10

animals to plow the fileds, no cotton gin no harvesters.
from planting to harvesting to spinning it it was all done by hand. it was hard boring tiring hands on ( labor intensive work) work