Agricultural News
Roller-Coaster Weather has not Helped this Year's Cotton Crop According to OSU's Seth Byrd
Wed, 17 Aug 2022 12:22:32 CDT
Farm Director, KC Sheperd, caught up with Oklahoma State University’s Seth Byrd talking about the latest on Oklahoma’s cotton crop.
“Not a lot of great success stories out there,” Byrd said. “I will say, there are pockets of good cotton. Obviously, in a year like this, it is going to be irrigated, but there is a lot of cotton that is obviously suffering because of the weather.”
Relative to the year, Byrd said there will be some decent yields, but there will also be a fair number of fields that are not harvested. The fields that are harvested, Byrd said, will yield lower than the average.
“You look at the crop, even the good stuff that is irrigated, and it is probably going to be okay- it is also showing some effects of the weather,” Byrd said. “We haven’t seen the crop really grow off, so when we start blooming, you will still see some vegetative growth occur, and I think you can kind of tell this year that when the bloom period started, that really heightened the number of resources that were allocated to the fruiting portions of the plant, and it really slowed down the vegetative growth.”
Due to the brutal heat in July, Byrd said some fruiting portions of the crop were lost and the fruiting window was shortened which pushed back maturity.
“Not worried about immaturity so much this year because the hot and dry weather is going to keep it from fruiting over a long period of time, but it certainly has pushed that window back,” Byrd said.
Byrd said that most of the cotton crop that was planted did not get enough moisture.
“It was a crazy six-week period- late May through the end of June- most of our cotton in terms of insurance plant windows was planted by the 20th of June hopefully before coverage,” Byrd said.
Looking back at farm trial data from over the years, Byrd said they are typically finished planning irrigated cotton by late May or early June. Dryland, he added, is usually planted by the first 10 days of June.
“This year we didn’t start planting dryland until I think June 15th because of all the rain we got in late May and early June,” Byrd said. “I think what was crazy to me is how wet we went. We were saturated, with standing water in fields and a lot of areas in early June, and by the time we were planting, which really wasn’t a week later, we were kicking up dust, the fields were drying out, and we had poor stand establishment and skippy rows.”
By June 20, Byrd said some farmers were not able to get planters in the ground because of how dry and hard the ground became.
“A lot of the cotton that was planted sort of in the middle of May, maybe some stuff that had just started to emerge,” Byrd said. “I think a lot of those storms started moving in, particularly in the southwest around the 22nd of May, at least that week. I think a lot of cotton that was planted in the week prior to that had to be replanted or spot planted after the fact when it finally dried out.”
If you look at the west-central part of the state, Byrd said, particularly around I-40 in the very western part, there were some huge rainfall totals that came within a few days, so it really caused some problems.
“Replanting might have been the most minor result,” Byrd said. “A lot of folks had to recontour some fields because of all the rain and water. It was a pretty crazy start to the season going from one extreme to the other and it swung away back to being dry again.”
With rain in the forecast, Byrd said it is probably too late for any of that moisture to make a difference.
“I always try to be optimistic because cotton lends itself to pessimism,” Byrd said. “It is a challenging crop to grow for sure.”
If you have some decent-looking dryland, Byrd said the rain is certainly going to help support some fruit load and it might prevent some shed.
“If you’ve got good-looking irrigated cotton and you get significant rain, maybe you can give your pivot a break,” Byrd said. “I think by large, if you are just waiting on a boll count, this rain is not going to do anything to help something that is probably going to occur anyway.”
Click the LISTEN BAR below to listen to KC Sheperd and Seth Byrd talk about the latest cotton condition and prices.
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