Texas Grower Brings an Eye for Detail to His Farming Operation

Texas cotton producer James Kamas has a mind for research. Ask him about the varieties he plants on his farm just east of Belton, TX, and he’ll surprise you with the level of detail he goes into.

So it seemed like a no-brainer for Deltapine to approach Kamas about participating in the company’s New Product Evaluator (NPE) program. Through NPE, Deltapine is able to evaluate potential varieties based on how well they perform on working cotton farms across the Cotton Belt.

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When Deltapine first approached him about joining in their efforts, Kamas obliged. After all, he’d been conducting similar commercial variety performance trials on his own farm for several years prior.

“For me, the NPE trials are nothing really different, other than we get some new varieties to try,” Kamas says with a chuckle.

To be sure, the commercial variety trials Kamas has been conducting since 2008 are second to none in the level of detail that goes into their data collection.

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“I work it up on a spreadsheet, given things like lint per pound and seed per 480-pound bale,” Kamas says. “I summarize all of the grade qualities and loan price. I basically apply our gin rates where I gin, and then look at it from an economics perspective. I’m looking at what the profit per acre is and taking out ginning costs.

“To me, that gives a wealth of information. It helps me decide on varieties from year to year, and that’s pretty much why we’ve decided to stick with DP 0935 B2RF and DP 1044 B2RF the past few years.”

Kamas grew up on the land he now farms, less than an hour north of Austin. He attended the University of Texas, graduating with a degree in chemical engineering. When he began farming full-time in 1998, he carried that mind for analytics into the world of cotton production.

All of Kamas’s acres are dryland acres, and he says he spent the first 12 years of his farming career chasing two-bale cotton. To him, the two-bale benchmark meant that you had made a phenomenal crop.

“In some of the years leading up to 2010, we came very, very close,” Kamas says. “But we technically never made it. And then in 2010 we just blew the lid off of it.

“We had good growing conditions, and we had two fields go over three bales an acre. Then in 2011 we had some tough growing conditions, but by 2012, we averaged two bales an acre,” Kamas says.

He is quick to point to DP 0935 B2RF as the variety that put him over the two-bale mark. When Kamas first began farming, he says, he was happy to achieve one bale an acre. But the technology and germplasm that his preferred Deltapine varieties offer him have raised the ceiling for yield potential on his farm, he says.

Of course, his attention to every last detail hasn’t hurt his efforts.

“We’ve added acres since I first began,” Kamas says. “A lot of our acres are contiguous, because our neighbors like the way we farm, so they ask me to work the place. I’m proud of that.”

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