Agricultural News
Cotton Harvest Prospects on Track for Outstanding Crop
Thu, 07 Oct 2010 5:25:17 CDT
Early Cotton Harvest reports from Oklahoma cotton gins show the potential is still there for a good crop and a 95 cent per pound of lint price is making cotton farmers happy across the Rollling Plains of Oklahoma.
At the Tilllman Producers Cooperative gin south of Frederick, gin manager David Lingle has ginned 300 bales of cotton to date and is waiting for more to come.
"If the producer waits until his cotton is ready to harvest, the yield really looks good," Lingle says. "If they have gotten in a hurry to harvest and bring it to us a little green, the situation isn't quite so good. With a 95 cent price waiting for them, farmers are going to be stripping a lot of cotton and getting it in quickly.
"These cold nights are not helping us right now. If temperatures will get back into the high 80s with plenty of sunshine, we will see some really good cotton in two to three weeks. We still have plenty of time to get the harvest started."
In Jackson County, Mike Berry, manager of the Cotton Growers Cooperative gin at Altus, explained his gin has processed 2,100 bales of irrigated cotton to date.
"There is a lot of our irrigated cotton that is still green," he said. "We are ginning with two eight hour shifts right now. It will pick up soon. This will be a good crop. We will see plenty of two plus bale cotton this season."
Still in Jackson County, the Eldorado Farmers Cooperative Assn. gin has ginned 400 bales to date. "We have been ginning for a week now," Barney Trammel, cooperative manager said. "We have about 900 bales in modules setting on the yard waiting to be ginned."
Trammel said Mike Mefford, one of his farmers, had a yield of 1,765 pounds per acre of lint cotton from one of his fields.
Trammel expects to gin more cotton in 2010 than last year. "We ginned 28,323 bales last year," he said.
Managers at Blackwell, Chattanooga and Burns Flat cotton gins report no cotton has been ginned at those facilities yet, but they expect action to begin in a week or two.
Ryan Sawatzky, manager of the Burns Flat Cooperative Assn. Gin in Washita County, reports cotton should be coming there in about a week. He expects a dryland crop yielding one and a half to one and three-quarters a bale per acre. "We ginned 6,300 bales last year and 2010 should be better," he said.
Up north at Blackwell, Ok., just south of the Kansas border, Great Plains Cotton Gin is still waiting for cotton to come in since it is well north of the gins operating in southwestern Oklahoma. They expect a good crop this year.
At the Tri-County Gin east of Chattanooga, manager Craig Bolton hasn't seen any cotton being hauled in yet, but he expects go begin ginning in three weeks. With over 30,000 acres dryland cotton planted this year by his producers, the gin will be busy when the season starts.
"Where we got rain at the right time, we could be harvesting two bale cotton," Bolton said.
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