As farmers sought to establish the cotton industry in Texas and tried to deal with the big challenge of needing labor at unpredictable times of year:
Planters imported monkeys from Brazil and tried to teach them to pick cotton, but the animals in the end were uncooperative. And geese, it turned out, will weed a cotton field when fenced in…[but] geese could not be trained not to trample cotton plants.
David Evans' personal blog 