Lots of cotton pickers needed you say
In her defense, this is the opposite. She's created a harvester, a motorized cotton combine. But no single farmer is planting enough fields to make the purchase of the equipment worth it. So she's hoping to get Nobles to buy the equipment and then lease it to their Tenant Farmers.
And honestly, she's going about this in the completely wrong way. She doesn't need to find patrons to buy the combine and lease them to farmers. It's something she should do herself. Since she's created at least a single working machine, she should hire staff to go around to independent/town farmers. Negotiate a regional rental agreement. And reap the profits directly. You can probably harvest a medium field in a day at most (For the small scale farms they'd cultivate, it could probably finish in less than an hour). For a whole town, this reduces the actual labor requirement for a cash crop to less than a day of work. This gets the independent farmers to profit directly. This will attract nobles and other people with bigger farms. Definitely a slower start, but ends up with the industry she needs without Friendship Point Bribes.