“…As a result, hand‐harvesting in the United States has become a research tool, providing researchers and agronomists with a view into the subtle interactions between cotton plants in time and space. Each fruit on the plant represents an individual flowering date, so the distribution of fruit on the plant represents the plant's response to its environment (Hawkins & Peacock, 1973), including weather and water availability (Bauer, Foulk, Gamble, & Sadler, 2009; Bednarz & Nichols, 2005; Bednarz, Nichols, & Brown, 2006; Jenkins, McCarty, & Parrott, 1990; Snowden, Ritchie, Cave, Keeling, & Rajan, 2013), fertility (Bondada, Oosterhuis, Norman, & Baker, 1996; Boquet, Moser, & Breitenbeck, 1993), planting density (Bednarz et al., 2006; Sadras, 1997), weed and insect pressure (Bednarz & Roberts, 2001; Mills, Bednarz, Ritchie, & Whitaker, 2008; Sadras, 1995; Wilson, Sadras, Heimoana, & Gibb, 2003), and short‐term catastrophic events, such as hailstorms or off‐target chemical sprays (Byrd et al., 2016; Yang, Kaggwa, Andrade‐Sanchez, Zarnstorff, & Wang, 2016), all with respect to time.…”