Risky Business: Texas Dryland Growers Relying on the Clouds
June 23, 2009 Lara Johnson
San Angelo Standard-Times
Doug Wilde’s job is a gamble.
“You stop by the bank and borrow some money, take it to Las Vegas and you’re scared to death,” he said.
Wilde doesn’t do his betting in Vegas, but rather on his farm between Wall and San Angelo, where he grows cotton. He compares it to sitting down at a craps table, rolling the dice and thinking, “Boy, I don’t know ….”
Cotton farmers’ success is tied to rain, and even then there’s cause for fretting. “When you see that big cloud coming you think, ‘I hope we don’t get any hail. I hope it’s a nice rain,’” Wilde said.
This year Wilde took an extra risk and planted his cotton in May, earlier than many cotton farmers in the area who waited to plant closer to the mid-June deadline.
“If we don’t get good summer rains, this early cotton starts stressing out,” he said. “It pretty much shuts down and calls it quits.”
He said many farmers wait to plant, hoping that hurricane season will produce rainfall in August and September to rejuvenate their crop and keep the cotton growing. Every farmer has to consider numerous factors, including rainfall and wind.
Sutton Page, the area coordinator for the Texas Farm Bureau, formed a ball of moist dirt in his hand and explained how to know when the soil is “perfect” for planting.
“You make a mud ball,” he said. “You knock a couple of inches of dried dirt ‘crust’ off the top and see how deep you have moisture. If you can make a ball out of it, it’s going to be good.”
Page said too little soil moisture makes getting a crop up difficult. Planting too shallow causes the plant to dry out.
In early June, planting cotton looked like a better bet than it did three weeks earlier, said Rick Minzenmayer, the extension agent for Runnels and Tom Green counties.
“We started the season out with our soil profile in not very good shape as far as soil moisture is concerned,” he said.
Wilde has subsurface drip irrigation, meaning his crops are watered three times daily from an underground pipe, but he still hopes for rainfall.
“It’s getting time we need a rain,” Wilde said. “We didn’t have much winter rainfall to give us a good, wet soil for a while. The little bit of rain we had earlier in the season is starting to play out. We’re hoping for more rain soon.”
If it’s raining, he can save money by turning the pump off and conserve groundwater for later use. He said the recent rains have helped farmers in the area, especially dryland farmers, those who have no source of water other than rain.
“You have to be excited about every rain,” Page said. A farmer must be “an eternal optimist,” he said. “If he has any pessimistic bone in him, he doesn’t need to be in the business.”
In most cases that business isn’t as profitable as it used to be. Page said the prices farmers are paid for their cotton have been flat – in fact, he said, the prices in the 1970s might have been better than they are now. Meanwhile, costs associated with producing the cotton have skyrocketed.
“Bags of cotton (seed) used to be around $20. Now they are almost $300,” he said.
That raises the stakes even higher, Page said. “Those planting now have white knuckles on the steering wheel” of their tractors.
Compared with last year’s dry conditions, the Wilde farm is off to a good start, but, “We’re still a long way from being finished,” he said.
“You hope and pray it works out,” Wilde said. “I wouldn’t do anything else with my life.”
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