A week  ago, I was driving to Memphis for the weekend and the drama of a bright, rich sunset with the rain lured me off my path. I took the chance to get off the interstate, and snapped a few photos in a couple of different places before finding a cotton farm at the perfect point of light. I snapped loads of photos and video on both my iPhone and my DSLR. I had to share a few pics from my phone immediately… this one grabbed me.

While some of my friends agreed that was a beautiful sight to behold, they weren’t as familiar with some of the other thoughts running through my mind as I stood in the light rain snapping photos. Knowing water was pooling up but could drain off that Delta field, but also wondering what the weather would be like for the next several days.

I turned to my cotton expert friends to ask them whether there are good and bad rains. A quick message thread on Facebook made it possible for me to check in with a few growing regions. I’ll put some of the photos I took that evening (no filters or editing!) along side the comments my friends had.

My friend Marjory Walker said her husband Bob (some of you may remember him giving my niece a first look at a cotton farm in Tennessee). She told me:

Bob says a slow and gentle rain over night, about 3/4 to an inch is usually a good rain. But it varies. Three inches in 15 minutes, a hard pounding rain, is usually a bad one.

A few hours south, Shea Whitfield in the Delta weighed in, looking a bit later into the season too: 

I will agree with what Marjory said. Also will add that once the cotton starts putting on fruit (editor’s note:  fruit is blooms, squares and bolls — the parts of the plant that will produce cotton lint later) the cloudy conditions that come along with the rain can be very detrimental by causing the plant to shed fruit. Also if we have been dry for quite a while a rain can jump-start the plant vegetatively and cause it to shed. So to answer your question sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad.

When Shea looked at the panoramic photo above, he added:

Makes me think you need to get the planter back out if it was just planted and it sandy ground. Hard packing rain makes it tough for a little cotton plant to come up.

He couldn’t make out that this field had a good stand of cotton already but the other pictures here make that clear. Even without seeing these pics, challenges for seedlings came to mind.

My friend Barry farms on the High Plains of Texas. He hasn’t been seeing the regular rains the Mid-South has had so he has a bit of a different perspective.

The rains we have had the last couple of weeks looks a lot like this, and the cool wet weather has caused some seedling disease and loss of some fields. On the other hand, without rain, NOTHING grows. After the drought we have been through in west Texas, all rain is welcome.

And further west, in Arizona, Kevin Rogers is used to having to irrigate cotton to get it growing. He said:

If the rain hits after its watered up we are ok as long as it doesn’t pond up. If we get a rain before we get germination and a crust forms on the soil and we can’t keep it wet we will have to replant. Agree with all the comments! We also don’t want a heavy rain when the plant is opening up as we get close to harvest.

There’s another post on the site about how damaging rain is on cotton at harvest.
In the days since, we’ve had more rain and cooler temperatures. That’s not exactly cotton weather. It loves a drink now and then but otherwise cotton plants prefer it hot and drier. I hope we get some perfect cotton growing weather soon!

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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

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the stereotypical bridge scene pulled from the net

I’m a visual person… always have been.  You can ask my mom and other family members.  Images hold a huge amount of importance in my life.  And while images can frequently be experience based, music creates a lot of images for me and it’s never far from me. The images created by a few songs come to mind on certain days too.  And with the third of June, comes the images I’ve had since childhood as I heard the first few lines of the son “Ode to Billie Joe.”  Somehow the “sleepy, dusty Delta day” and images of working on the farm grabbed me even way back then.  Those images had an inherent romanticism to me but as the song went on, the images of family and small town life had a much sadder appearance.

Growing up, I never imagined I would spend more than a decade in the place of those sleepy, dusty images.  I can’t imagine how many sleepy, dusty Delta days I dragged through or the times I crossed a bridge over the Tallahatchie River.  And while I never had to chop cotton or bale hay, I sure knew folks who were to be found in the field doing just those kinds of things.  And I’d frequently grab a camera and head down a turnrow to see what was happening.

Small town stories like the one relayed in the song were certainly passed around quickly, especially if they involved tragedy. I lived in a town of just 600 people for quite a few years and that small town and others in the Delta, had their share of tragedy, just like big cities. The tragedies that have stuck with me the most were the car accidents out on a deserted road somewhere, or some sort of crash with a four-wheeler or jet ski. All too frequently it involved teenagers or someone else just getting their start in life, like the parabled Billy Joe and Bobby Lee.

Despite the reality that there was a decent amount of sadness during my decade in the Delta, I rarely think about the things that brought me to tears while I was there. Instead, images of wandering down the turnrow to a cotton or soybean field, the way the river rushed past, practical jokes and those dinners with friends come to mind. The kind of dinner with the sort of friends where it’s fine to admit it’s been a sleepy day. Those are the images I have of the Delta… even if the soundtrack is a bit sadder.

I hope you enjoy the third of June, whether it’s sleepy or dusty. I know a few folks who still have hay to bale and there are likely some weeds in a cotton field somewhere need a bit of attention too. Even if there is a lot of work to be done, I hope you have some relaxed images in your rearview mirror.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZt5Q-u4crc]

The post It Was the Third of June, Another Sleepy, Dusty Delta Day appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

I’m not sure how many folks know how farmers know whether its time to plant. When it comes to my favorite crop — cotton, there are lots of different guidelines, but one grabs me.

In the Mississippi Delta, there is always an oxbow lake, a creek, the Mississippi River or some body of water nearby. If you aren’t familiar with oxbows, they have been created over centuries as rivers wander. I find oxbows like Lake Bolivar intriguing as they can be mistaken for the river at times. And having lived & worked right in that watershed, I have a special connection to it making it the primo in my experience/opinion.

Deer Creek comes out of Lake Bolivar and weaves its way through the Delta, covering hundreds of miles. Taking a short drive in the region, you can quickly find yourself crossing Deer Creek several times.  But at the mouth of the creek, where the Mississippi formed Lake Bolivar and just a few miles from the place where the levee broke in 1927, those soils are legendary for cotton. The silt loams are called ice cream soils — they are incredible. And it seems the fish appreciate the area too! Cause every afternoon, boats can be found on the lake or in the creek. It seems cotton and fishing are both tightly connected to Deer Creek and Lake Bolivar.

That’s why the guideline for planting grabs me so. Legend goes that you plant cotton once the folks fishing on Deer Creek or nearby lakes, etc stop sitting on buckets and sit on the ground itself. That’s because warmer soil temps are needed with cotton. The University of Tennessee suggests waiting for the soil temperature to reach 65 degrees at the 4 inch depth. This way, farmers can get the crop off to a healthy start.

For now, it seems the folks I see are still sitting on buckets for now — temps are warming though in my part of the world but corn & rice are still the focus for now.  We could be planting cotton soon!

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