The results are in for the region’s 2013 cotton crop, and the final tally indicates yields that were dramatically impacted by a third year of continuing drought as well as untimely hail and wind storms.
“It was a tough year with almost half of the planted acres abandoned by harvest,” recalls Gary Cross, Texas A&M Agri Life Extension agent for agriculture in Hale County.
“The planted acres were down to begin with, and we had some very damaging hail storms in May and late July which really hurt the crop.”
According to figures released by the National Agricultural Statistics Service and posted Friday by Plains Cotton Growers, Inc., Hale County farmers produced 176,400 bales of cotton in 2013 from 96,600 harvested acres for an average yield of 877 pounds per acre. The county’s producers originally planted 194,800 acres.
The region’s top producing county was Floyd with 228,900 bales from 122,300 harvested acres. Yield averaged 898 pounds per acre. Floyd County farmers planted 182,000 acres, which means they were forced to abandon about a third of their crop.
Lamb County, with 116,500 bales, also made the Top 10 producing counties in the region.
Briscoe farmers produced 23,000 bales in 2013, Castro County had 40,200 bales and Swisher County had 74,100 bales.
The lack of moisture continues to cast a large shadow across on the 2014 crop, Cross said Wednesday.
“The wind and dust, along with extremely low humidity, are really hurting everyone,” Cross said. “We’ll probably see planted cotton acres down by as much as 60,000 acres because of the current conditions.”
Due to strong dust storms and high winds over the past two weeks, along with the continuing drought, Cross called the current wheat crop “a disaster. Our dryland crop can be considered largely a total loss, while some of the wheat and Triticale under irrigation could be still be used for forage and fodder.”
While corn is up and going, and in many areas 6 inches tall, farmers are finding it necessary to switch chemicals because dust left on the leaves from resent storms is preventing traditional foliar fertilizers to stick to the plants.
“The dust and dry conditions are really causing us problems,” Cross notes. “We basically just need rain, and lots of it.”
Looking at the 2013 cotton crop, the National Agricultural Statistics Service shows that High Plains growers produced about 2.44 million bales of cotton last year, a decrease from the 2.93 million 480-pound bales in the 2012 growing season and more than 220,000 bales less than the 2.67 million bales projected by NASS in its January 2014 report.
Planted acreage in 2013 was down again from the previous year, totaling just more than 3.76 million acres. Unfortunately, producers brought less than half of that to harvest at 1.68 million acres, which wasn’t much more than the 1.54 million acres High Plains producers reported harvesting two crops ago in 2011, when the abandonment rate hit a record high at 66 percent. The abandonment rate from initial plantings in 2013 was 55 percent, and 44 percent in 2012.
According to the final county level production estimates released Friday by NASS, the Plains Cotton Growers’ 41-county service area accounted for almost 59 percent of the 4.1 million bales of upland cotton produced in Texas last season. Statewide production was down 17 percent from 2012, although statewide average yield per acre, at 646 pounds, was up 23 pounds from last year.
On a national basis, Texas growers accounted for almost 34 percent of the 12.2 million upland bales produced in the United States in 2013, maintaining their position as the No. 1 cotton producing state in the nation. Georgia was second with 2.3 million bales.
Source - http://www.myplainview.com/
