Congratulations on the activation of the International cotton picker that was refurbished by Arnan and Chaim under the guidance of Itzik.

And since soon we will be able to show it to the "city dwellers" and the younger generations, here is a bit of history in brief so that we can tell and explain to visitors: Cotton picker No. 502 belongs to the first two-row hydrostatic picker, model 622, in the country, which arrived in 1969 and was then considered the height of agro-technical advancement at the time for Kibbutz Gesher. The first place this picker harvested was at the end of August 1969 in a religious cooperative moshav in the Golan Heights called "Ramat Magshimim," and from there to "Ramot," which is located on the edge of the Sea of Galilee, and continued to Ein Carmel and HaBonim, and from there to the Hefer Valley until mid-October, and then back to Kibbutz Gesher for our cotton (and then a design problem with the picker also became apparent. They brought an engineer from Texas, USA, who sat with me in the heatwave of the Jordan Valley on the picker (without a cabin) to try to understand how much yield there was in the field - he didn't know what a kg (pound / stone) was, he didn't know what a dunam was, and he didn't work with acres or hectares but only with "bushels." Once we got through the issue of yield (600 kg per dunam), he claimed that they hadn't designed the picker for such a yield, and they would go back to the drawing boards in the USA).

The Jordan still flowed, and time passed, and in the late 1980s, there wasn't enough water in Israel, and the world price of cotton also fell, and cotton cultivation almost ceased. The picker was sold to someone from Balforia who tried to turn it into a combine harvester for hot peppers but failed, and in the mid-2000s, the picker was transferred to the museum.