Harvest season is fast approaching for the largest cotton-growing region in the U.S., with some growers even opting for an early start this year.
Mark Brown, the Director of Field Services with Plains Cotton Growers, explains, “We will be headlong into the cotton harvest soon. I know there’s been a lot activity with corn and sorghum harvesting up here on the High Plains, and actually, believe it or not, I know of at least one dry land cotton field that has been stripped. Now, it was a small field and it was a field that the producer knew that it wrapped up fairly early and it was not going to be one of his higher yielding fields, but he decided that it was worth harvesting. He went in there and went ahead and got it taken care of and he got it defoliated and desiccated and then went in there and harvested that. It has not been joined yet to my knowledge. I also might mention that I’m talking with a lot of gin managers here on the High Plains, who are anticipating that during the first week of October, they will see cotton coming in on the yard, and most of them that have an early October demand charge with the electric company, once they’ve met that calendar date, then they are most likely going to get an early start this year.”
As far as predictions for this year’s crop quality goes, Brown says that it is too soon to tell but he does expect to see a lot of variability.
“It would be premature for me to say what the quality is going to be like. I was very concerned about that last year and we ended up with pretty good quality out here on the High Plains throughout the season, and I certainly hope that’s going to be the case this year. But you know, the people that have been out in the fields, especially on the dry land crop, realize how stressed that crop was during much of August. August certainly was not kind to the High Plains area for the 2024 growing season and with very warm nights and with a lot of fields that stressed, it is very possible that we could see a lot of variability in our quality this year,” he adds.
According to USDA’s latest Crop Progress, just 22% of Texas’s cotton crop has been harvested so far.
