Cotton farmers enjoy record yield despite rainy weather

Volatile weather plagued Arkansas farmers in 2021 and it threatened to impact the number of acres harvested and yields for many crops. Cotton was expected to be hit particularly hard by the often-rainy weather but surprisingly it set an all-time yield record in 2021.

“Arkansas cotton yielded an average 1,287 pounds of lint per acre according to the latest estimates,” said Bill Robertson, extension cotton agronomist for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. “That’s a new record, beating out the previous record of 1,185 pounds of lint per acre set in 2019.”

The 2021 average yield is an estimate from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. NASS is projecting that Arkansas’ total cotton harvest this year will reach 1.26 million bales from 470,000 harvested acres.

Arkansas cotton growers planted 475,000 acres in 2021 and harvested 470,000. That’s down from 525,000 acres planted and 520,000 acres harvested in 2020. The number of acres harvested this year was harder to estimate due to fields lost from excessive spring rains.

Arkansas farmers have grown cotton for nearly 200 years. When the crop was first introduced in the state, it was grown in counties throughout, but the deep, rich soils of the Arkansas Delta along the Mississippi River became the preferred growing spot for the plant that fueled the textile boom of the last century. Northeast Arkansas’ cotton crops were the top performers in 2021, Robertson said. Mississippi and Craighead counties led the state in total acres.

“A little more than half our cotton is north of I-40,” he said. “Some farmers in that area said this is the best cotton they’ve ever seen.”

GOOD PRICES
Overall cotton fiber quality was good, Robertson said, adding that cotton color has also been good.

“Fiber quality was better last year, probably because of the varieties growers chose. But we still have really good fiber quality. … We’re seeing most of our cotton with a color grade of 41 or better. That’s a good color grade.”

Fall rains often begin to lower color quality as the fiber gets wet, Robertson said. But unlike the spring, the fall has seen no excessive rainfall or damaging hurricanes. Northeast Arkansas’ record cotton crop happened despite a late planting season that was hindered by constant Spring rains.

“Farmers typically are able to get out in the field to plant in late April, and the optimum window for planting is the first 10 days of May,” Robertson said. “The last two years have seen cotton planted later because of heavy rains making the fields too wet to get into. Most of our crop was planted in the second half of May, and some stretched into June.”

Cotton growers who made their crop benefitted from good prices, Robertson said. The USDA Weekly Cotton Market Review in December said prices for base quality cotton ranged from a low of 101.63 cents per pound to a high of 104.44 cents per pound. The USDA estimated that cotton growers would have to make $774.56 per acre to break even. Even at the lower end of that price range, growers making 1,000 pounds of cotton per acre would make more than $1,000 per acre, clearing the break-even point by almost $270 per acre.

A typical rental agreement of 20% crop share with no cost share would lower this to almost $61 per acre with no allowance for return to management and overhead, Robertson said.

“This year, we had great prices and people in Northeast Arkansas especially had a great year,” Robertson said. “That doesn’t happen very often.”

Historically, he said, growers experienced low prices when cotton yields are high.

“Normally, when cotton is cheap you can grow the fire out of it.”

RAIN REALITIES
Despite the positive results in Northeast Arkansas, other regions in the state didn’t fare as well. Many counties in central and southeast Arkansas had excessive rains that flooded fields, some of them repeatedly. Fields planted in many rain-soaked areas had lower yields, Robertson said, and some crops were completely destroyed before the harvest.

“I talked to a farmer near McGehee who told me, ‘This is the third time I just finished watering my cotton and got a big rain,’” Robertson said. “It’s just the luck of the draw with rain, because you can’t control Mother Nature, and she can be kind of mean to us sometimes. Cotton is like watermelon. It needs the water it needs, but no more. When it gets too much, it just ruins yields. Some cotton fields didn’t bust 1,000 pounds per acre in central and southeast Arkansas.”

Robertson said the rainfall was spotty, with some fields getting flooded and others in the same county getting just what they needed. Farmers who managed to make a crop despite the rain-soaked Spring benefitted from better weather in the summer, Robertson said.

“We had mild temperatures in August and warm temperatures through September. Normally cooler mornings in September just shut the cotton down, but we had good temperatures to finish the crop off,” he said.

Robertson said east Arkansas dodged a bullet because heavy summer rains from this year’s hurricanes missed the state.

“In the past, often we had a good crop out there, and then a hurricane brings in rain and damages the crop. That didn’t happen this year,” he said.

Overall, growers who didn’t suffer the worst of the rainy spring and got good rains through the summer did well.

“This year, we were able to get a good portion of the crop that the plant produced to the gin,” Robertson said. “That is key to producing record yields.”

COTTON VARIETY RESEARCH
Fred Bourland, professor of plant breeding and genetics for the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, released three cotton breeding lines in 2021, adding to the six lines he released in 2020. The Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station is the research arm of the Division of Agriculture. Bourland said the new breeding lines produce high lint yield.

“They’re better than UA222, a high-yielding variety released by our program in 2011, and approach the fiber quality of UA48, our top-quality cotton variety,” Bourland said.

Unlike varieties, which are available to growers through seed companies, breeding lines, or germplasm, provide breeding material for cotton breeders. Being released means other breeding programs can use the Arkansas germplasm in their own breeding efforts to incorporate their desirable traits, like adaptation to Arkansas environments and high fiber quality.

Sharing of breeding material among public and private research programs allows breeders to move desirable traits into plants adapted to their regions’ growing conditions. Bourland said he is preparing some more cotton germplasm for release, perhaps in 2022.

“They’re in our conventional variety testing program now,” he said.

Robertson expects cotton acres to be higher in 2022. Good yields and strong prices should encourage growers to plant more cotton in 2022, Robertson said.

“People in the industry think we’ll be up to 2020 levels for acres planted despite the significant increase in input costs and possible availability issues of inputs that are expected in 2022,” he said.