Scurry County cotton farmers aren’t getting much help from Mother Nature and it’s making the fate of the 2017 crop more uncertain by the day, observers said.
Scurry County Extension Agent Greg Gruben has been watching this year’s crop closely and right now, he is not very optimistic about its potential.
“You’ve got to take a shotgun approach to the crop this year — it’s all over the place,” Gruben said. “Some of the irrigated cotton looks really good, but the dryland crop ranges all the way from not good at all to maybe OK. A good rain right now would be the best thing in the world, but I don’t think this is one of those years where we’re going to have an average crop.”
Sporadic rainfall has been the main culprit behind this year’s struggles he said.
“It’s just been too sporadic,” Gruben said. “One farmer would get a good rainfall, but you could go a mile down the road and there’d be nothing. It’s been that way all over the South Plains this year, not just here.”
The lack of adequate rainfall has combined with a late-season heat wave to put the cotton crop in further jeopardy.
“From Aug. 20-25, it would have been great if we had gotten a two-inch rain, but we didn’t get it,” Gruben said. “The cotton I’ve seen now is hot and wilting in the field. Nobody is going to have a bumper crop dryland farming this year.”
Significant rain in the next few weeks could help the crop’s chances, but Gruben isn’t feeling very optimistic about that happening.
“It would help the crop a little bit,” he said. “But right now, what we’ve got is what we’ve got. Who knows what the next few weeks will bring.”