This is another one of the “no brainer” posts for my 30 days of thanks series. I am sure some of you were beginning to wonder whether I was going to wait and make this my grand crescendo at the end or something, but I have to admit, that I’m not really that organized! LOL!

Why am I thankful for cotton?

As I type this up, I am sitting in my home, finally just relaxing. It has been a crazy busy couple of weeks and it feels a bit like my sofa is a long lost friend! When I got home, I needed to start some laundry, etc. I changed into some comfy flannel pajamas and dang if the sense of the relaxation didn’t IMMEDIATELY set in! I mean putting on a pair of pjs totally changed my mindset. That’s the touch the feel of cotton and happiness!

Who do I have to thank for cotton?

There is a long list of people who are involved in getting these pjs to someone like me! We frequently forget to think about the origins of things around us… I mean you can’t possibly think through all of this stuff all the time! But for me, I tend to be a bit more aware of the cotton chain than some because I have friends that are links along the way! You can always see my Cotton 101 page and cotton posts if you want to learn more.

I have worked in the cotton seed business since the mid 90s. That puts me in a place where I get to see the very beginning of it all! I know cotton breeders who are out there working to make better seed for cotton farmers. That seed is what farmers plant to produce lots of cotton bolls. Those bolls get harvested and then taken to the cotton gin where ginners separate the seed from the lint. The bales of cotton we all have heard so much about, then go to a warehouse (warehousemen) where they are stored til a marketing cooperative or merchant sells them to textile manufacturers! And eventually they show up in stores with familiar labels or price tags.

How much did cotton farmers grow this year?

I took a little time to get some numbers together…. First, I looked at the August 2013 Crop Production Report, you see that the 2013 crop was forecast to hit 12.9 million bales (480 pound bales). That means we are down from last year quite a bit — 26 percent in fact! A really major factor in this was planted area. See, in 2012, there were more than 12.3 million acres of cotton planted and this year there were only 10.3 million acres planted to cotton but it is also important to note that there is also expected to be a drop in pounds harvested per are too. In fact, it is a statistically significant drop of 91 pounds per acre.

When you look at them, this will be the smallest cotton crop U.S. farmers have harvested in the last 5 years!

Where Heroes Are Made

The team at Deltapine (where I spent more than a decade) is celebrating cotton farmers too! They did this really great song with a group of Nashville musicians who wrote a song called “Where Heroes are Made.” The music video is available now and it features a cotton farmer I know from Georgia — Chuck Coley! Here the story of how Chuck’s family farm has transitioned over the generations as he and his son talk about the family’s history in one of the behind the scenes videos. And yes, I love that the song was written by a Memphis guy!

Related articles

• Our Cotton Plant
• First Freeze Threatens Cotton Crop
• GA Cotton Harvest Off to Late Start

The post Thankful for Cotton & The Folks Who Plant it & Get it to Me! appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

I’m overdue to write up something explaining what’s going on in the world of US 2013 cotton acres. Of course, it has been the topic of discussion for a lot of cotton meetings this winter and the spring planting season was bumpy with weather. I figured now is as good a time as any to talk about what’s going on.

Winter Cotton Planting Projections for 2013

The winter meetings showed a range of projected acres from the USDA’s  projected 2013 U.S. cotton planted acreage of 10.0 million acres (down almost one-fifth from 2012). They said it was “due mainly to lower cotton prices and relative net returns that favor shifts to alternative crops.” The National Cotton Council’s (NCC’s) planting survey (taken in December-January) provided a lower number forecasting 9.0 million acres before prices rose a bit. The survey pointed to a movement from cotton to corn and soybeans in the Delta and the Southeast and wheat, corn and sorghum as the main replacement of cotton in the Southwest, and wheat and specialty crops taking acres from my favorite fiber in the West.

Spring Cotton Planting Results 2013

The USDA NASS issued it’s 2013 acreage report on July 28. And thankfully the USDA was closer and cotton acres didn’t drop as much as farmers had thought they may as the total came in at 10.251 million acres. That’s probably due in part to the fact that cotton prices rose a bit and spring weather in some areas made it hard to get earlier crops in the ground but it still represents a big drop from 2012.

The chart below shows which states had the largest drops.

* all numbers in thousands

I had to add the change column to see where the drops were. Then I realized I wanted to know on a percentage basis where the changes were most significant. Surprisingly, Florida and Georgia were the only cotton-producing states that had increases in planted areas with 16 percent and 1 percent increases respectively. The states with the largest percentage drops were Oklahoma (down 51%), Kansas (down 46%), Arkansas  (down 46%), Louisiana (down 43%) and both Mississippi and Tennessee cutting their acreage by a third (33% and 32% respectively). Now the watch is on to see how these acres do through the summer. Hail storms sometimes make farmers abandon acres as can drought.

Here’s hoping to a successful year for the country’s cotton farmers! I’m hoping to continue to lose weight so I will be in the market for some more jeans!

Related articles

• USDA revises 2013 cotton acreage estimate
• Cotton growers persist amid drought, storms
• USDA Acreage Report
• Farmers are Planning For Cotton Harvest as They Plant Cotton

The post 2013 Cotton Acres Early Projections & Planting Estimates appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

My friend David Hayden asked me today whether I had a top 10 list of cotton states. He tweeted:

@JPlovesCOTTON do you have a blog post with the top ten #cotton producing states or know where I can find such a list?

— David Hayden (@Davidhayden7) August 26, 2012

I didn’t have a top 10 post and as I sat down to research and write it, I began pondering how in the world I could work that out. I am sure that this sounds like a super easy question to lots of people but I had several ways to think about a top 10 so rather than do one, I am going to do a few of them. You can see some of the options in the text of the latest USDA Crop Production Report’s national numbers for 2012 (for 2014 cotton production, please see this post):

All cotton production is forecast at 17.7 million 480-pound bales, up 13 percent from last year. Yield is expected to average 784 pounds per harvested acre, down 6 pounds from last year. Upland cotton production is forecast at 17.0 million 480-pound bales, up 15 percent from 2011. Pima cotton production, forecast at 663,000 bales, is down 22 percent from last year. Producers expect to harvest 10.8 million acres ofall cotton, up 14 percent from 2011. This harvested total includes 10.6 million acres of Upland cotton and 233,400 acres of Pima cotton.

Top 10 Cotton States in Acreage / Area to Harvest in 2012

This year, farmers in the US had some reductions in cotton acres as more farmers in the Cotton Belt looked to make money planting a corn crop. That seems to have worked well for quite a few of them too. There were more than 10.8 million acres planted to my favorite fiber though with almost half of those acres in Texas! Georgia was another big area for cotton planting and we will see whether or not Hurricane Isaac has any impact on the anticipated 1.2 million acres to be harvested there. (All numbers listed in thousands.) 

1. Texas                   5,215.5
2. Georgia               1,245
3. Arkansas             570
4. Mississippi          570
5. North Carolina   545
6. Alabama              387
7. Tennessee          375
8. California            363
9. Missouri              355
10. South Carolina   278

Top 10 Cotton States in Production / Total Number of Bales in 2012

With the incredible number of acres Texas has, it is probably no surprise that the Lone Star state takes the lead in the number of cotton bales produced! In fact, many of the top 10 states in terms of acreage do well in showing up production-wise. Note: cotton bales weigh an average of 480 pounds each and can make a lot of awesome textiles!

1. Texas                   6,725
2. Georgia               2,400
3. Arkansas             1,200
4. California            1,145
5. Mississippi          1,100
6. North Carolina   950
7. Missouri              675
8. Arizona                658
9. Tennessee          590
10. Alabama              580

Top 10 Cotton States Per Acre Production / Yield in Pounds Per Acre in 2012

You can see from this year’s numbers as well as the averages over time that areas of the Cotton Belt where weather was good for production really excelled compared to the traditional deep South areas where drought was a problem in 2012. Arizona and California tend to produce high pounds per acre whereas some of the other areas can tend to be a bit more variable.

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