I love harvest time and while we have a while before we will be picking cotton in Missouri, a time-lapse video of cotton boll opening from the Texas Gulf Coast sure is getting a lot of people excited about what is to come!

Over the years, we have shared about cotton plant physiology quite a bit — creamy white flowers turning pink and into a boll that does the Jiffy Pop dance to open. Well, this year, Justin Roberts (@horned_ranch on Twitter who is a crop consultant in Sinton, TX) caught a boll opening on video. He has rocked the Twitterverse for sure! Just check it out.

Justin says it took a few days for the boll to go from initial cracking to fully open. It also takes some good sunshine and heat units.

Justin has worked in cotton quite a while — he reminded me we had worked on some projects in Georgia years ago. He has a depth of knowledge in cotton genetics and physiology that makes him naturally curious (he’s say nerdy) about things like this so he set up his camera and let it go for a while. I’m always a fan of this sort of thing but time-lapse video of cotton? Sign me up! I love that you can see the strong sun of mid-day and the shadows of morning and evening come and go.

We laughed about how the breezes coming off the Gulf of Mexico make this branch dance more than you’d necessarily expect. But with 10 years in Texas, he’s grown used to the breezes and wind. I suggested he could set up a stake or brace and duct tape the plant to it (no, I never expected him to agree).

It’s interesting to realize that way geography hits when Justin points out the proximity to the Gulf means there is really no measurable irrigation — wells there pump saltwater!

The post Time-Lapse Video of Cotton Boll Opening appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

I have to confess, I thought this year was going to be different. If you read the 2019 cotton acreage projections I shared, you may remember that excitement about acres going up. So when I saw that one of my favorite farm Instagrammers would plant their first cotton crop, I had high hopes. Both for the crop and my ability to follow cotton from afar. I could see the photos that were to come and I had visions of her contributing to the blog all year. Just look at this photo she (Lindsay Kimbrell) took of cotton several weeks ago. (And while you are there follow KimbrellFarmPhoto!)

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Future jeans, shirts, sheets, towels or fabric! Hope this crop does well, I can’t wait to watch it! • #Cotton #TexasCotton #FabricOfOurLives #helenaagrienterprises #deltapinecotton

A post shared by Lindsay Kimbrell (@kimbrellfarmphoto) on Jun 1, 2019 at 11:12am PDT

See what I mean? Lindsay is clearly a talented photographer. I appreciate her sending me so many great shots for this story. I’ve gotten a bit ahead of myself though…..

Meet the Kimbrells

This post is to introduce you to Lindsay Kimbrell, her husband Todd and their family farm in Itasca, Texas as part of the Farmer Friday series I kicked off a while ago. Before you Google Itasca, it is south of Dallas along I-35.

Lindsay is the one  who keeps me up on what’s happening. She explains the family’s path by saying “My husband started with working on the family land and eventually found his own. He was 18 and rented some land that had been in conservation for years so he had a lot of work to get it ready for crops.”

Todd’s a fifth generation farmer and Lindsay admits he’s really helped her grow her depth of understanding. “I’d say it’s in his genes and his grandfather had a love for farming so was able to provide some good words on a hard day to get him through.”

The Kimbrell’s have been growing grain for the most part but this year seemed a good one to try cotton. “We grew a little bit of cotton back in 2011, which was our first go at it personally. It had been grown before by my husband’s grandpa, but that was many years ago. We recently just rented some land that is great for cotton, so we tried again this spring.”

Texas Blacklands

Texas is broken into several different agricultural regions. And the area where the Kimbrells farm is called The Blacklands. “Our area is very high in farm land,” she explains. “This is called the ‘Blacklands’ because our soil is black and very good for growing. It’s a sort of sweet spot in this area.”

Lindsay says she can’t help but hope grandpa would be really proud of the work they have done and the way the farm has grown. She says part of that has been the knowledge of soils and data.

“Technology is a huge part in our operation,” she says. “Todd is very particular about soil health, planting population and fertilization. He never wants to strip the soil of its health. We leave as much organic matter as we can after a crop. We use precision planting monitors and products to get accurate seed depth and spacing.”

All of this is done with an eye on the future too as they are “growing our operation so the next generation, meaning our children and little brother, can hopefully carry on the legacy.”

The 2019 Cotton Crop

The Kimbrells were looking forward to a first cotton crop. Lindsay points to her love of t-shirts and you can see her enthusiasm for the future in that Instagram post.

Those plants though took a real beating from hail recently. “Unfortunately are first little cotton crop in years is hailed out,” Lindsay says and explains that the insurance process is in the works.

I can remember being surprised by a Dallas hailstorm a few years ago… my car definitely looked worse for the wear and tear. Well, with plants, that tears open the plant tissues. Leaves can be ripped off the plant and it is easy for diseases to get in, photosynthesis is really reduced, some plants are maimed while others are killed.

These are days farmers dread. All their hopes for a field’s reaching full potential fall coming to an end. Some of the other fields are doing better with other crops though. And Lindsay’s excitement for the future is still there. She’s decided to continue to follow through learning more about the process. “The local ginners and I have a great friendship and I plan to still come visit and watch the process and I plan to ask what cotton grown here gets used for!”

Follow Lindsay and Kimbrell Farms

I hope like you feel you’ve gotton a chance to meet Lindsay, Todd and the rest of the Kimbrell family. They have entered the cotton farming world and it hasn’t worked out so far. But 2019 is being pretty hard on farmers regardless of crop with flooding, hail, unseasonably cold weather and more. In the Blacklands farmers worry they are too far past the planting window and further north on the High Plains, people are still contemplating planting for the first time. If you want to see how things get resolved for the Kimbrells, check out their social media. Here are their handles & URLs!

• Twitter: KimbrellFarms06
• Facebook: Kimbrell Farms
• Photography & Instagram: Kimbrellfarmphoto
• Lindsay also has a blog Flip Flops & Row Crops where she occasionally posts about what is happening on the farm and in life in general.

The post Kimbrells First Cotton Crop and It’s Not Gone as Planned appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

For days, I check on several friends each time I hop on social media. I have been watching to see how they are in dealing with Hurricane Harvey bearing down on them. First concerns are for the people, but I can’t help looking to see how the farms are doing. Hurricanes have ripped through friends’ crops too many times, I’ve seen farmers prepare for hurricanes and deal with the aftermath.

When a friend sent me a message asking me questions about cotton in Harvey, I decided to talk with my dear friends Kelly and Jon Whatley who grow cotton, milo and more in South Texas. They have already faced what we hope is the worst of it in their area, so took a bit of time to help me understand how it is going.

First, I am glad to have seen you posting that you are all fine. Can you tell me what the storm was like in its height where you are? What’s it like today?

Very noisy. Landfall was at night, so we couldn’t see what was flying around or how bad it looked. We are in the middle of a field with no protection, but that also means no neighbor’ debris flying around either. Saturday morning, we woke up to water standing in the yard and lots of limbs down, tree and plant debris. We had power Friday night until around 8:00 PM. Luckily we have a generator that runs off a tractor’s PTO shaft so we have had electricity.

What you have heard from friends and family along the coast? What’s it like for them?

Yes. Some total devastation other very little damage. One friend (Hannah Miller) lost contact with her family near Rockport in the height of the storm but ended up locating them after some scary hours of not knowing. Her family’s home and farms are terribly damaged but her family is safe. Friends in Aransas Pass and Rockport will be assessing the damage and working to clean up/repair for a long time.

(Editor’s note — I was watching Hannah’s updates closely. She evacuated but some family stayed behind. She’s since returned to the area with supplies to help.)

Any estimates on how long it will take to get power back and other services, etc?

Some people are getting power back now. Officials are saying it could be up to 10 days for some areas. Our house is the very end of our line. I am afraid we may be the very last to get electricity back. Most water districts are on a boil notice if they even have water. Electricity for the pumps to fill the water towers still hasn’t been restored. We have never lost water.

I had watched cotton harvest with such excitement. If you backed up the clock to two weeks ago, what would you have told me about the 2017 crop? (Here’s photo from July — how cute are they?!?!)

I would have told you we were looking at a fantastic crop with historical cotton high yields. It was the best cotton crop of our 24 crops. Spirits were high in the South Texas farming community.

Where are you now? Modules in the field? Some of the crop ginned?

All of our crops are totally harvested. There was cotton sitting on every spot on all the gin yards in the Coastal Bend. 50% of our cotton had been ginned. Rest at gin yard or fields. The ginners try to store the unginned modules on pads or higher ground, but when it comes to a hurricane, all bets are off. The tarps help protect the cotton some, but many tarps blew off. The round bales/modules are better protected since they cover more cotton surface.

Here are some of the photos Kelly’s taken (remember she’s on my list of top farm Instagrammers for a reason). I’ll try to explain what we are looking at. This first one is a shot of modules (some round and some rectangular, some call the round ones round bales) waiting to go to the gin. 

You can see some of them are sitting in standing water.

What about other crops? Neighbors up the coast?

Other crops harvested here. Up the coast, early news is devastation for unharvested crops. Reports of gins closer to the coast heavily damaged with modules blown away.

I’ve heard conflicting information on crop insurance, can you tell us what you have found out?

Crop insurance covers historical value, not value in the field. This was a banner crop and the insurance levels does not meet banner yield levels. There are huge deductibles, and we are not to the point to know details yet. Crop insurance is not very helpful at this late stage. We don’t know how it will all shake out since we’ve never been in this situation.

What happens next for the farms in that area?

First we have to dry out & assess the damage. We found some trees that took out fence sections at the ranch, so we will get to fixing those first to keep the cattle contained. We are used to waiting on Mother Nature, and will have to wait for the rain to stop.

How will the farmers in Texas deal with all those wet modules? How will they dispose of them?

Again, the waiting game. Have to let the modules dry out. Then assess if the cotton is ginnable or not. One of the problems with agriculture – nothing is immediate. We have to wait for nature.

The cleanup everywhere else may be over but the gins and farmers will just be getting to the point to make decisions. Even if the cotton is ginnable, the quality is much lower. Cotton is graded on quality, so the grades will take a hit. In turn, the farmer will get less money for his cotton.

More photos to share and understand what they are looking at from being ginnable, maintaining quality, etc. Some of the problems are similar to dealing with rain at harvest time because with all the water and warm temperatures, some of the seed that is still sitting in the module may start to sprout. Jon’s finger is pointing to a root that has emerged from a seed and if you look closely you can see several more. That really is difficult on a gin that is designed dry cotton lint and cotton seed.

This photo shows how incredibly bad the wind has been. The field that you are looking at had been picked. Winds from Harvey beat up the rectangular modules so much, it seems to have twisted the fiber back onto the plants! I couldn’t have imagined….

But this photo is even more illustrative of the point the Whatleys made… the round bales / modules definitely held together in the wind better. You can see that the plants in that section of the field are showing up as dark swaths. Wow.

Thoughts will stay with them for the coming future… Kelly said they may have some drone footage to share soon, but for now, there is more work to do.

The post How is Hurricane Harvey Impacting Texas Cotton Farmers? appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

While I was in Lubbock for work recently, I decided to add on a personal night so I could play in a couple of cotton fields!  There is something about Texas dryland cotton that has always captured my imagination — heck my first video post shows a really short glimpse at it. The crop is so similar and yet really different from the cotton that I get to see so often as I drive between my current home in St. Louis and my family’s hometown of Memphis.

But maybe before I get too far into this story, I should be sure we all understand what I’m talking about.

What is dryland cotton?

A lot of the U.S. Cotton Belt depends on rain for crops, it is telling that crops in the Southeast and Mid-South cause those crops rain-fed, but the Texas High Plains and some other areas of the state where rain is less common have always been called dryland crops.

This Year’s Texas Dryland Cotton Crop

This year, luckily, many Texas dryland farmers started the growing season with some moisture and many have had decent rains. That means the fields of dryland cotton look a good better than drier years. In fact, I did this video and realized it was still damp in the field which, if combined with some good hot weather for a couple of weeks, could really help create yield.

You’ll see how many cotton bolls the compact plants can put on… it is impressive how loaded the plants are. And I saw a lot of 5-lock bolls which is generally seen as an indicator of high yield potential.

The post The Texas Dryland Cotton Crop Looks Good This Year VIDEO appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Last week I took several vacation days and while I found lots of time to see some brand new sights in New Mexico that left me at a loss for words, I also saw something so familiar…. something I hadn’t really see much of. I saw a few fields of cotton. With my schedule this summer, I’ve mostly missed the 2016 cotton crop and it sure doesn’t show up here much!

But while I was visiting my friend Jay Hill (check him out on Instagram and Snapchat) who grows a wide range of vegetables as well as has a few beef cattle, a bit of corn…. he also is planting his first cotton crop! He was nice enough to make a drive by several cotton fields, his and some of the other farmers in that area. It was beautiful too!

That combined with this photo from Bill/killemducks on Instagram showing what a lightning strike did to his cotton field last weekend made me wonder how everyone else’s crop is. Having been in a lot of cotton fields over the years, I immediately recognized lightning damage… amazing how fast the cotton in that area is fried crisp!

I asked some friends to give me a quick update on their farms. Right now it is hot across most of the South, well and the Midwest too!

North Alabama Cotton 2016

Sam Spruell is a cotton farmer in North Alabama. And he thinks he may have the only furrow irrigated cotton (this means water is piped in on one end of the field) in Alabama. At least he doesn’t know of any more in the area.

“It’s only 50 acres but it sure is nice,” Sam says. “We started watering cotton last week will put out 1.5 inches per week till we start getting bolls then up it to 2 inches per week till it’s finished. It has been dry in my part of Alabama but some areas have gotten spotty showers. It is much easier to catch up with furrow than our pivots.”

Texas High Plains 2016 Cotton

Long-time friend Barry Evans farms in Kress, Texas, up on the High Plains between Lubbock and Amarillo. For several years Barry has been working on was to conserve both soil and water — the wind and high temps are really challenging out there.

He sent two photos of his cotton planted in a way that is really conservation-minded.

Barry explains:  “This is cotton no tilled into wheat stubble. Irrigating in LEPA  (low energy, precision application) which is over 95% efficient. The stubble acts as a mulch to reduce evaporation, making every drop count. Also applying nitrogen fertilizer through the pivot, spoon feeding the crop only as it needs it.”

South Texas Cotton

Friends John & Kelly Whatley are on the earliest end of Texas… where the US cotton crop frequently has the first bale of the year — yet to see for 2016 cotton.

Kelly says, “We are defoliating in the Coastal Bend area of South Texas. The crop looks really good at this point. We had good spring moisture plus some rain in late May/early June to finish out the bolls. Crossing fingers the fiber turns out off the plant and in the gin as good as it looks on the plant.”

Kelly sent some great photos…. love seeing cotton getting ready for harvest! Makes me ready to get into a cotton picker.

California 2016 Cotton Crop

Out in California, my friend Cannon Michael (remember that time I went pheasant hunting on his farm?) is growing a bit more Pima cotton than usual. With the weather in California, he can take advantage of those long days to make longer stronger fiber. He says the crop looks really good and points out that all the Pima he planted this year is “going to www.pimacott.com program. Sheets in Costco now. Bed bath & Beyond next.”

I love how different the plants look… the flowers sure look a lot like their relatives the hibiscus! Unlike Texas…. California still has a ways to go! “We are still irrigating and won’t shutoff for another month probably. Harvest looks like first week in October.”

A Quick Cotton Tour

So there you go… a quick glance at the cotton crop across several states this week! Hope you enjoyed it as much as I have.

The post The 2016 Cotton Crop: A Photo Tour of Several States appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Related articles

• How does our farm decide what to plant?
• S is for Seed – It All Starts with a Seed
• What is No-Till?
• Weeds are a Challenge for Farms of All Types

The post Farmers are Planning For Cotton Harvest as They Plant Cotton appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Over the last two weeks, I have seen some really neat 12 days of Christmas posts. And along the way, I got inspired to put together the “12 Days of Cotton.” Seemed like a fun thing to do. I wrote it down last week and am just getting it to the blog. I hope you enjoy it and you could sing along, at least in your head.

Rather than write out every verse that keeps building, I will cut to the chase. I’m even going to be goofy enough to sing 12 Days of Cotton if you want to give it a listen.

On the twelfth day of cotton, some fiber love I see…

12 farmers farming

11 DD60s

10 Pima shirts

9 designer labels

8 ginners ginning

7 pesky insects

6 row picker

5 bales an acre!

4 warm hoodies

3 good rains

2 cotton socks

and a favorite pair of jeans!

In case any of you are interested in a bit more information on each of the things I included in the lyrics…. here’s some background information.

• 12 farmers farming — Well there are more than 12 cotton farmers for sure, but at a moment’s notice, I can always rattle off a dozen or so names of cotton farmers who are great friends. Who’s on the list really varies based on what I’ve been thinking of that day or week though as there are so very many great people who grow my favorite fiber!  Here are some of them who talk cotton online:
  • Texas’ Suzie Brasher Wilde through her Kissed a Farmer blog and Facebook page
  • Alabama’s Brian Byrd is on Twitter as ?@bigbyrd24 and just finished picking this weekend
  • Georgia’s Trevor Smith is on Twitter and blogging as GAFarmer80
  • Australia’s WarraBoy Brendan Taylor tweets cotton from down under
  • Georgia’s Ashlee blogs at Across the Branch about her family & their cotton & watermelon farm
  • Tennessee’s Bob Walker showed my niece Alicia around her first cotton farm visit.
  • Texas couple Jon and Kelly Whatley are both on Twitter and she has a photo &  family blog called FarmFresh.
  • The Texas Cotton Producers put this together to share their story.
  • California’s Travis Fugitt shares info through his Twitter account @tfugitt and I put some of his pics on my blog.
  • North Carolina’s Brad Warren tweets his crop and recently finished harvest.
  • Oklahoma’s Danny Robbins tweets from @rdr5hunter
  • Australia’s Bess Gairns tells Tales of a Cotton Wife on her blog and has a Facebook page for it too
  • and in case those aren’t the twelve cotton farmers you want to find, I have a list of cotton peeps who tweet you can follow.

• 11 DD60s — This one may be something a few of you aren’t familiar with. I know I wasn’t til I started being surrounded by cotton physiologists! Anyway, DD60s (pronounced D D sixties) are heat units based on temperatures above 60 degrees. Farmers compile this information so they know how the crop is developing. You can learn more about DD60s here.
• 10 Pima shirts — A lot of people are surprised by how soft and yet strong Pima shirts, sheets, etc are. It’s because Pima cotton has longer finer, strong fiber. I wrote a post about Pima cotton & what makes it different a few months ago that you may find interesting.
• 9 designer labels — Great folks work with my favorite fiber! You can get good clothes without spending a lot of money or you can go for really high end fashion that’s more expensive. It is really up to you! You can learn about them through the TheFabricofOurLives.com or @CottonFashion on Twitter.
• 8 ginners ginning — Cotton farmers and consumers depend on a variety of jobs to get that natural fiber from the farm to our wardrobes. One of the ones that just seemed to fit the song was cotton ginners who gin the cotton separating the seed and lint. Here’s a look inside a cotton gin.
• 7 pesky insects — The boll weevil maybe the insect that most people know, but cotton is really attractive to some bad bugs — beet armyworms can really instill fear as can bollworms, budworms, plant bugs, aphids, white flies and more! Mississippi State Extension has a lot of information on the bugs that plague cotton farms. And farmers have a variety of ways to control bugs.
• 6-row picker — The first time you see a six-row cotton picker going across a field of cotton, you may flashback to Star Wars or something! They are hulking machines who do the work of bringing a crop in for most US farmers even if they are four- or five-row pickers. Incredible to watch them run! Here’s some video of a cotton picker from this fall.
• 5 bales an acre! — The phrase alone excites me — five bales an acre! That means a farmer would be harvesting approximately 2,500 pounds of lint in the area that football is played on. While five bales to the acre is rare — the average harvest is closer to 1 – 2 bales an acre but there are farmers who can harvest more depending on the weather conditions, etc.
• 4 warm hoodies — It’s winter! Everyone needs a good hoodie or 12!
• 3 good rains — Water is a must and this year with the drought that plagued most of the Cotton Belt, we would have loved just three good rains! We will dream for a bit more in 2013!
• 2 cotton socks — You can make a bunch of socks out of a bale — more than two thousand pairs actually!
• and a favorite pair of jeans! — My favorite pair of jeans is one that is three sizes smaller than the pair I wore at this time last year! Lee Jeans sent them to me after I featured a photo from their Facebook page on my blog.

———

And now that it is 2018… I decided to do a video!

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Janice Person (@jplovescotton) on Dec 16, 2018 at 6:11pm PST

The post The 12 Days of Cotton — My Christmas Homage to My Favorite Natural Fiber appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

I love a day that starts with a friend alerting me to some cottony goodness! That’s exactly what happened today as I checked in on Facebook and saw that my good friend Carrie Mess aka DairyCarrie had tagged me in a post! It read simply “Hey Janice look what’s in this month’s American Airlines magazine.” and showed this photo:

I did what any self-respecting cotton lover would do — searched the net til I found the article online so I could read it! The American Airlines magazine American Way is online, so it just took a little searching to find the Kings of Cotton article. The article starts:

“See, Wade? Look at the weeds in there.” Ben Ivey steers his pickup around the edge of a cotton field. “Are we gonna spray some more? You probably need to.” Ben’s son, Wade, sitting in the back of the truck, just nods. He knows the weeds will be a problem at harvest if they mix with the cotton bolls.

Wade is the fourth generation to farm this land at the edge of El Paso, Texas — and possibly the last. In good years, the Iveys grow Pima cotton fine enough for a Brooks Brothers shirt. But this year, two-thirds of their farmland near the Rio Grande is sitting idle because of the drought. The city is encroaching too. The Ivey farm is the last inside the city limits of El Paso. “Last year, all this was in cotton,” Ben says as the truck lurches over a dirt road by empty fields.

Ben heads back to the family’s battered old ranch office two miles north of the border, steering past a Wal-Mart and warehouses built on their land. Trucks from Mexico whiz by on Loop 375, the massive border highway that encircles El Paso. The Iveys — savvy businessmen as well as farmers — gave up land for the highway, keeping a big parcel for future development. But Ben Ivey is in no hurry to turn his cotton fields under for a shopping center. “Everybody in El Paso can’t figure us out,” he says, chuckling. “We farm valuable commercial corners. We’re probably stupid for not selling because of the money.” He turns the truck toward another plot of cotton and grins. “We like to farm.”

This is what makes America great.

This holiday season, when you wrap up that cotton shirt for Dad or that set of luxury cotton towels for Mom, think of growers like Ben and Wade who are working under drought conditions not seen since the 1950s. They grumble a lot — about Washington’s policies, local interference, water shortages … the usual stuff — but the Irish Iveys have been growing cotton in the high desert since the 1920s, and they are determined to keep the fields in their family another generation. “People these days have grown away from the land,” Ben says as he kneels down in a field, picking the yellow flower off a cotton plant. Beneath the flower is a green ball or “boll,” which will mature and split open to reveal the fluffy white stuff we know as raw cotton.

via Columnists 12-01-2012 :: AmericanWay.

The dilemma the Ivey’s face with urbanization is fairly common. And I admire the Ivey’s for choosing to do what they love rather than taking the easy paycheck and selling all of their farmland for commercial uses.

Christmas Gifts with Farm Origins

I agree! We should think about where our cottony good gifts come from! And I’ve got a few blog posts that may help you think through just that ahead of time!

The Ivey’s grow Pima cotton. Do you know what makes Pima cotton different? I mean otherwise it would say they grow cotton since the vast majority of cotton is upland. Pima is a premium fiber that is longer and stronger than upland. With Pima fiber, textiles can be woven differently and that results in a finer, smoother feel. In fact, my favorite hoodie zipup is Pima. If you’d like to know more about Pima, including what those blooms look like,  you can read this post.

And if you are interested in some of the Christmas presents I gave last year that started on a farm somewhere, well, there is a post for that too! I declared “Farmers Helped Me With My Christmas Shopping ” last year as I reflected on Christmas gifts with farm connections.

What’s one of your favorite gifts that has origins on the farm?

The post Your Brooks Brothers Shirt May Have Started in El Paso, Texas appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

People frequently ask me why cotton farmers do this or that. One of the most common questions is about GMO cotton, or why they would plant a cotton variety that has been genetically modified in one way or another.

I have talked about the choice in bits and pieces, but I think this post by Suzie Wilde of I Kissed a Farmer fame does a great job of explaining her farm and the choices they make.  Rather than try to speak for her, I am just putting the first couple of paragraphs here with the recommendation you visit her blog to read the rest.

A Buggy full of Cotton

For harvest season this year, I left my office each day at noon to go run the boll buggy for the Farmer I Kiss.  So why would I go to work early to get my office work done, then drive 40 miles to the dusty, noisy, bumpy, late night job of cotton harvesting?   Because harvest season is the best time of the year.  It means we actually beat the Chihuahuan Desert and produced cotton!

The post Why would a farmer plant GMO cotton? appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Saw this video floating around and have to admit, it left me wordless. I see a few familiar faces (after all the cotton industry is pretty small). But somehow, I didn’t know anything about this video til this week! And it was shown at a meeting SIX MONTHS AGO!

Great video that shows cotton from the farm to the runway! Are you wearing Texas cotton? I LOVE IT! Have LOTS of blue jeans to show for it too!

Texas Cotton Association from Studio 84 Productions on Vimeo.

The post Cotton Is Life in Texas — Cotton Farmers Tell Their Story VIDEO appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.