This year’s cotton crop is not holding up quite as well as farmland prices.
The National Cotton Council says that acreages are down belt-wide
“I think it’s going to be a pretty low crop. The WASDE numbers have not really caught up to that, but I expect they will soon when the acres report— now that the new reports come out based off of what the FSA officers have reported on acres. But it’s a down crop across the board. Hopefully, we’ll see a spike in prices do that, but we have not seen that yet,” according to Tas Smith, the council’s VP of Producer Affairs.
Despite price and crop production challenges, Smith says that there is a lot of optimism in the Big, Beautiful Bill signed by President Trump.
“We’re very excited about the ag provisions, the cotton provisions, and the reconciliation package raises the sea cotton reference prices to $0.42, which is a very good increase. Going back to 1990, that reference price was triggered 35 in the last 37 crop years and a $141 an acre average payment... it makes a really good change. It makes SEO more like stacks, and growers can enroll their sea cotton base acres in PLC, and also take SEO as well. So that’s a positive change,” he notes.
Smith goes on to say that the National Cotton Council has been at the forefront of advocating for that increase for some time.
