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Texas Agriculture Archive

July 4, 2003

West Texas cotton pounded

By Mike Barnett
Editor

Rain, hail, wind, disease...Mother Nature is taking its toll on the world's biggest cotton patch as June storms pounded some 750,000 acres in the 25-county area surrounding Lubbock.

"It's been a very, very rough start for folks up in the High Plains," said Randy Boman, Extension cotton agronomist based in Lubbock. "Historically, at least in more recent years, we say we plant somewhere around 3.75 million acres here in 25 counties. The last numbers I saw indicated at least somewhere around 750,000 and perhaps as much as a million acres was either destroyed or badly damaged."

That estimate was made before the weekend of June 21-22, when another round of storms rumbled through.

"I'm sure there's going to be a lot of fields that will be lost from that, that were underneath those thunderstorm areas," Boman said in an interview with Texas Farm Bureau Radio Network's Curt Lancaster. "We just keep getting pummeled by rain, almost on a nightly basis in some areas, and with a crop that's already sick and environmentally damaged, we're just not looking at good growing conditions for some of those fields."

Boman said he wouldn't be surprised if the High Plains lost a million bales of production. Another concern is that many of the fields, located in the heart of the high production, irrigated areas north of Lubbock, were destroyed after the insurance deadline, so those fields weren't replanted to cotton.

Luckily, the dryland situation "is about as good as it's been since 1997," Boman said, speculating what dryland will do to offset irrigated losses.

"And with so many acres that were damaged or destroyed and replanted late, we have to have a very good September in order to make a very good crop in those fields. So we're still going to be at the mercy of Mother Nature...," Boman said.