Make Your Water Count
February 9, 2012 
As any grower in the Southwest region will tell you, drought is first and foremost on the minds of the region’s producers. And there’s a good chance that singular issue could cause a massive shift of acreage out of corn and into cotton in the Texas Panhandle in 2012.
“We’re normally planting about half our acres to corn and half of them to cotton. This year we’ll probably plant one-third to corn and two-thirds to cotton,” says Steve Olson of Plainview, TX. “The advantage of the rotation for us is the timeliness of being able to get to the cotton with our water. What we’re really focusing on is trying to knock it out of the park with our yields in the cotton.”
Olson is able to aim high for his yields – even in a year dogged by drought – thanks to advancements in cotton germplasm that allow cotton producers to achieve higher yields on less water and in shorter seasons. He’s not the only grower in the Texas Panhandle who is optimistic about producing a stellar cotton crop in 2012, either.
“I would say, in our county, 50% of the acres that were planted to corn in 2011 will be planted to cotton in 2012,” Olson says.
Some estimate that as many as 270,000 acres of former corn ground will be planted to cotton in the coming year. For perspective, that total would represent almost the same amount of cotton acreage as what was planted in the entire state of Louisiana last year.
It’s no secret that cotton is a less water-intensive crop than corn. In most Texas farmer’s minds, that is the first factor when deciding to make the switch out of corn and into cotton. But for decades, the determining factor was the shortened growing season in the northern part of the state.
Cotton has found a foothold in the Texas Panhandle thanks to two developments, according to Olson. A major factor has been the arrival of top notch, short-maturity cotton varieties that can produce high yields during the often extremely-short seasons of the High and Rolling Plains. But Olson says the change into cotton was brought about out of necessity due to a dwindling water supply.
“The number one thing is the availability of irrigation water north of Plainview started to fall, and so people started to look for alternative crops,” Olson says.
For most growers in the region, the dwindling amount of water availability has been a problem they’ve been aware of for multiple years. They’ve known the day was coming when they wouldn’t be able to produce a viable corn crop.
“A lot of these growers don’t have the water to grow 250-bushel corn anymore,” says Kyle Lawles, Deltapine Territory Agronomist for the region. “They do have the water to grow a great cotton crop, though, and we have done the research to be able to tell them which of our varieties will be the best fit on their farms, based on the amount of water they have.”
Mulch for Your Field
Like many West Texas producers, Olson has gotten creative on how to make the most of the water he does have access to.
In recent years, Olson has become a huge proponent of a strip-till system that allows him to maximize his soil moisture. He plants 30-inch centers in his corn, and simply moves over 15 inches to plant his cotton while leaving the old corn row there in between the cotton rows. The idea, he says, is to capitalize on the organic activity in the soil.
“As that corn starts to degrade and those old stalks start to rot, you’ve got an enormous amount of earthworms, millipedes and centipedes and other things that are bedded in the soil,” Olson says. “You’re getting a ton of tiny, tiny holes in your soil from that life that’s going to the surface to eat and then going back down.
“So if we get a thunderstorm, those dead stalks in the field are slowing that water down, and these worms and things are allowing that water to hit the ground softer and find its way deeper into the field. We’re saving our soil. It’s like putting mulch down in your flower bed, really,” Olson says.
That type of progressive practice has helped Olson be successful in the oftentimes harsh growing conditions of West Texas. The harsh realities of the 2011 drought left Olson and other producers in his region with a better understanding of just how valuable rainfall can be.
Those memories of 2011 have made water efficiency a major factor for Olson when he’s choosing a variety for his farm. He says the variety he’s been most impressed with on that issue has been Deltapine’s DP 0912 B2RF.
“I’ve seen that variety hang in there and wait on water and turn out really well,” he says. “Another that I had as an experimental variety last year was DP 1219 B2RF. It handled our water situation really well, and the yield was just phenomenal. I think it produced somewhere in the 1,700-pound per acre range.”
Lawles agrees with Olson’s assessment that the DP 0912 B2RF may be the most water-efficient variety on the market in West Texas.
“DP 0912 B2RF is a little loose in the burr, but it’s still pretty stormproof. Yield-wise, nothing has been able to beat it,” Lawles says.
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