Ricky Yantis has farmed 6,000 acres in cotton near Lubbock, Texas, for more than 40 years. The 20-county area around Lubbock is known as the state’s premier cotton patch. In a normal year, it produces more than 60% of the state’s cotton yield and more than a third of the nation’s total crop.
Yantis’ acres are a mix of dryland and irrigated, with both spray systems and the newer subsoil drip irrigation systems. This year, Yantis is looking to save 168 acres of drip-irrigated crop. The rest is gone.
“Even with irrigation, it’s tough,” Yantis told High Plains Journal. “We get these hot, dry winds here. We call it ‘God’s convection oven.’ Even with drip irrigation it’s hard to get that sub-soil water to the top of the ground.”
As this summer unfolded, cotton growers knew it was going to be grim. For many, including Yantis, the drought began last summer. The area around Midland, Texas, only received 8% of its normal rainfall between September 2021 and May 31 of this year. Some cotton-growing areas got a little rainfall in the spring, but not enough or at the wrong times. “We didn’t get any rain from July of 2021 until May of this year,” Yantis said.
When rain finally did come, it was too much and not the right timing. Six inches of rain on Aug. 20 created washes in the dry soil, meaning dirt had to be moved and broken up. “We were able to fix some of our issues” in the land. “We had cotton farmers from the mid-South visit us one time, and they couldn’t believe how hard we worked,” Yantis said. “They had never seen a sand-fighter”—a machine that break up the soil after rain, turning over clumps of moisture to keep it from getting blown away. “A lot of our ground is minimum-till.” In this region of 35-mile-an hour winds, holding town topsoil is a concern.
Growers watched as cotton plants failed to germinate and grow, or fields simply burned up. The flurry of stories that appeared in the ag press in late summer about this year’s dire cotton harvest has subsided as growers absorb the figures.
The International Center for Agricultural Competitiveness at Texas Tech University estimated that cotton production in the High Plains will be down by $2 billion this year. In a normal year cotton, Texas’ largest crop, accounts for $4 to $5 billion of production.
According to Gary Joiner, director of communications for the Texas Farm Bureau, it’s estimated that between 70% and 75% of cotton acreage in the cotton patch around Lubbock were abandoned this year. “We’re talking both irrigated and dryland acres,” Joiner said. “Some acres got some rain, but it wasn’t at the right time. A lot of growers stopped the water and the inputs. Even some high-efficiency above-ground sprinkler system just weren’t keeping those plants alive.”
Only about 2.5 million of the total 7.9 million acres of cotton that Texas farmers planted are expected to be harvested this year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is forecasting the smallest U.S. cotton crop in 13 years. According to the USDA’s Oct. 2 crop report, 21% of the Texas cotton crop and 43% of the Oklahoma crop is rated very poor, with 48% and 21% respectively rated poor. Yields have been about half of normal.
Rain outlook
What about the moisture outlook for next year? The western U.S. is still in a La Niña weather pattern, according to John Nielson-Gammon, Texas state climatologist and director of the Southern Regional Climate Center. That means hotter and drier weather than usual during the winter months, when soil moisture needs to be replenished. Nielson-Gammon said the picture for snowpack this winter looks better in the northern than the southern Rockies. Thanks to La Niña, however, the outlook for the Missouri River next spring is looking better than for the southern Rockies.
“The next stop for potential concern is winter wheat. Some areas are a little dry, others are a lot dry. It’s the same story for winter forage crops,” Nielson-Gammon said. Yantis plants rye, triticale and wheat both as cover crops and for the market, and he’s planting them early this year. “We buy them as cheaply as we can, because the market is so high.” They go mostly to dairies, which have also been affected by the drought.
Tough teachers
Drought, heat and crop losses are tough teachers, but they do have lessons to teach. Cotton growers in Texas and Oklahoma are determined to learn from this year’s devastating cotton harvest. “Researchers are telling us that there’s no way this year’s tough conditions could have been replicated in a lab or greenhouse,” said Joiner. He said the tough conditions helped accelerate genetic research into traits that will help future cotton plants better survive droughts.
The drought conditions also meant that pressure from weeds and insect pests was reduced. “When the plants are having a tough time in drought, everything else is having a tough time,” said Seth Byrd, assistant professor of plant and soil sciences at Oklahoma State University and the 2021 Cotton Specialist of the Year, in a YouTube video posted in September.
The real size of this year’s crop is not yet calculated, for a reason that Yantis explains. “In some cotton areas, they have pickers that pick out the lint before the boll is harvested. Here we have strippers that strip everything off the stalk. That means the lint and trash isn’t separated out until it goes to the gin. The harvest monitors don’t really have accurate yield readings.” Someday, Yantis said, someone will have to invent a cotton-specific yield monitor.
Cotton gins and cotton-processing infrastructure are clustered around Lubbock, and Yantis said the effects will ripple outward. “They say every dollar a farmer spend changes hand seven times. The gin I use normally processes around 150,000 bales a year. This year they’re hoping for 25,000.”
How will cotton growers react to this year’s losses? They will take this year’s insurance payments and prepare for next year’s production, said Joiner. Yantis said he is thankful for crop insurance. But it’s calculated based on a 10-year average of yields. Counting this year, some of his land has already lost four out of the last five seasons.
“The real downside won’t come until next year,” Yantis said. “That’s when the negative cash flow starts, because you won’t have any of this year’s crop to sell.”
David Murray can be reached at [email protected].
