Cotton will never be "king" again in Arkansas, or in the South, but its upswing continues.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, after two weeks of surveying farmers for its annual farm-production forecasts, said recently that it expects Arkansas farmers to plant 500,000 acres of cotton this year, up from 375,000 last year.
The USDA also projected a 370,000-acre increase in planting of soybeans, to 3.5 million acres, the most in Arkansas since 1998.
The numbers for cotton came as a bit of a surprise to Bill Robertson, a cotton agronomist with the University of Arkansas System's Agriculture Division, which works with the USDA in gathering the Arkansas estimates.
Robertson said he expected some 400,000 acres to be planted, but revised that estimate, to about 430,000 acres, after talking to a few more consultants, farmers and members of the state Boll Weevil Eradication Board.
Arkansas farmers planted 1.1 million acres of cotton in 2006 but just 210,000 acres in 2015, an all-time low, as they turned to less-expensive crops, such as soybeans, corn, or grain sorghum, also known as milo. Many cotton farmers sold off their high-dollar cotton pickers, which are good only for picking cotton. Gins across the state also closed, from 86 in 2000 to only a couple of dozen today.
"I found a few farmers who planned to plant, maybe, 25 percent more, because, even though they'd gotten out of cotton for a while, they still had their pickers," Robertson said. "I also found a lot of farmers in southwest Arkansas getting into cotton again after being out of it for a long time."
Cotton prices are about 75 cents a pound, up from about 56 cents a year ago, and worldwide consumption of cotton is up, but the increase in planting comes primarily because the prices for other commodities are poor, Robertson said.
"Cotton acreage is filling in for corn, it's replacing beans," Robertson said. "Sorghum is in the pits, and you can't make any money off corn. If pickers weren't an issue, we'd see a lot more cotton. The prices are better for cotton than anything else, but they're still not good enough for a farmer to go out and buy more pickers."
If the 500,000-acre projection by the USDA's National Agriculture Statistics Service holds "we're going to really need a good fall," Robertson said.
Nationwide, the statistics service projected 12.2 million acres of cotton, up 21 percent from last year. The projected jump in Arkansas cotton was second only to Texas, where farmers said they'd plant another 1.2 million acres of the fiber, for a total of nearly 7 million acres.
Cotton farmers overall had good weather for cotton picking the past two years, he said. "If we have a wet fall, we'll have cotton in the field a long time, and that's never good. We really need to be out of the field by Nov. 1."
There will be plenty of work for Arkansas farmers who still have pickers and want to be "custom harvesters,'' who work on a contract basis to pick cotton for farmers who no longer have the equipment, Robertson said. But wet weather will stretch out, and delay, the harvest, he said.
Last March, for its 2016 forecast, the USDA projected 330,000 acres of cotton in Arkansas. Eventually, 375,000 acres were harvested, yielding 1,075 pounds an acre. The latest generation of cotton pickers form the cotton into modules, instead of bales. A bale of cotton weighs about 500 pounds, and modules hold 13 to 15 bales, according to the National Cotton Council.
Rice in Arkansas was projected to decline by 1.2 million acres, according to the USDA, also because of lower prices. The agency projected a 25 percent drop in long-grain rice, and a slight increase in medium-grain acreage.
Corn was projected at 600,000 acres, down from about 760,000 last year. Grain sorghum was projected at 20,000 acres, down from 47,000 acres a year ago.
Peanuts are expected to be at 25,000 acres, a slight increase from last year.
No change was projected in the planting of winter wheat, at 195,000 acres.
Business on 04/05/2017