How’d Texas Do That?
February 5, 2009 In 2000, the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) said Texas cotton growers produced 3.94 million bales of cotton on 6.4 million acres. In 2007, again according to NASS, they more than doubled the number of bales to 8.1 million, and did it on 1.5 million fewer acres.
What changed to help Texans increase yields from 2000’s 430 pounds per acre to 2007’s 827? In a word — everything.
“We’re learning how to utilize our water better and drip irrigation has helped,” says Randy Coleman of Levelland, TX. “We’ve fine tuned our fertilizer applications. And varieties have really changed the way we produce cotton.”
Subsurface-drip-irrigation (SDI) covers 1,100 of Coleman’s 3,000 cotton acres in Roosevelt County, NM, and Bailey and Cochran Counties in Texas. The remaining acreage includes 1,400 under center pivots. “I think we get more bang for our buck with drip because we’re not wasting water,” he says. “There’s no evaporation and everything goes directly into the root system.
“Our water table is beginning to drop, and we don’t have near the water we used to,” Coleman continues, “so we to try to make the most efficient use of it.”
Adds B. J. Kennedy, “Ten years ago, a bale-and-a-half was a good crop. Now with pivots you need to make two bales; with drip you need to make three. And you can.”
Kennedy raises 1,800 acres of cotton near Levelland, and also works at the Wilbur-Ellis retail dealership there. Kennedy has 1,000 acres of irrigated land, with 500 of that in SDI. Another 50 acres of SDI is going in now.
Coleman installed his first SDI system six years ago. “Chemicals and fertilizers are injected into the drip system and it puts it right where the roots are growing,” he says. “We’ll run zinc through twice when the plants are young because zinc releases other nutrients. We try to feed the plant everything it needs when it needs it. We will also run Vydate through for nematodes.”
Coleman’s battle is against the root-knot nematode, and in addition to Vydate, he fights them with Temik and crop rotation. “I had a couple of farms where the cotton nearly died because the nematodes were so bad,” he says. “Our ideal rotation to break the nematode cycle would be peanuts, followed by a small-grain crop like milo, then back to cotton.
“Until grain prices went up so high, peanuts were the only crop besides cotton that would cash flow here,” he continues. “We were the first ones in the county to grow peanuts and all of a sudden, our cotton yields started increasing tremendously behind peanuts.”
Coleman uses composted manure more so than manufactured fertilizer because, he says, “we’re getting more nutrients to the plants from the manure. The feedlot brings it to us in their spreader trucks and we incorporate it. The feedlot will add some fertilizer to the compost to get it into a form that will break down, but mainly it’s manure.”
Using Mother Nature’s best fertilizer is the only thing remotely low-tech in Coleman’s operation. “When John Deere came out with the RTK system, I was the first to get in line,” he says. “It’s tremendous – we can do everything accurately.
That accuracy allowed him to move from 8-row equipment up to 16-row. “I bought a 16-row bedder and I saw what I could do with that,” he says. “We’ve expanded everything to 16-row and I have been able to cut down on my fuel, tractor time and labor.”
Caption:
Randy Coleman and B. J. Kennedy
Caption:
Randy Coleman is a FiberMax believer.
Sidebar caption:
Kyla Coleman
Caption/source for chart:
Texas Cotton Yield (pounds per acre)
Source: National Agricultural Statistics Service
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