BEIJING, March 31 (Xinhua) -- Nearly 70 percent of cotton fields in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region use machinery to pick cotton during the harvest season, making large-scale manual cotton-picking a thing of the past.

Statistics from the Xinjiang Agricultural Machineary Bureau show that there are some 5,860 registered cotton harvesters in Xinjiang, more than 2,900 of which are made in the U.S., including those of well-known agricultural machinery brands like John Deere and Case.