Texas Growers Thankful for Help from Mother Nature

From Cotton Grower Magazine – August/September 2014

 

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Like many dryland farmers on the Texas High Plains, David Warren was caught just a little off-guard by Mother Nature in 2014. Of course, following three years of crippling drought, it’s easy to see why he wasn’t expecting the late May storms that swept across his farms.

Warren, 37, didn’t harvest a stalk in either 2011 or 2013. In 2012 he was able to strip some of his 6,000 acres of cotton – but it’s safe to say he wasn’t breaking any yield records.

“We went from complete drought conditions to the end of May, and all of a sudden we kept getting rain after rain after rain,” Warren says. “That delayed planting, and then we had to replant probably three-quarters of our acres due to storms. We got too much rain to start out.”

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In all, Warren says he caught three significant rain events in the early going of the 2014 season. After years of frustrating drought, he suddenly had a whole new set of challenges to overcome. But make no mistake, he says, he much prefers the heavy rains to the alternative. And Warren had taken some measures going into the season on the off-chance that the rains finally came.

“Our land was in pretty good shape, so we were prepared for it either way,” he says. “We had everything clean. I had good beds ready to plant on. I had two fertilizer rigs primed and ready to go.

“And the minute it started raining, we started with the two rigs fertilizing in front of the planters, and got everything ready. We had all of our equipment ready but didn’t have inputs in the field. We just had to put it in high gear when the rains came.”

That bit of pre-planning looks like it could pay off this season, according to Warren.

“We are about one month behind where we’d like to be, due to having to replant and getting delayed,” he says. “But barring an early freeze, we’ve still got a good chance to make a lot of cotton this season.”

Warren says he considers 375 pounds an acre to be a typical yield on an average West Texas dryland operation. But thanks to a combination of improved seed technology and surprisingly ample rainfall, he could be in store to set new yield records on his farms this season. He’s aiming to pull in more than 700 pounds per acre.

Because of its ability to handle various water scenarios, DP 1044 B2RF has become the go-to variety on Warren’s operation. In fact, he intended to plant all of his acreage to the variety this season before the early rains set his timing off kilter. Now, he says, he’s relying on the early-maturing DP 1212 B2RF to pull him through in this abbreviated season.

“I think DP 1212 B2RF is one of the quickest ones they have,” Warren says. “It’s extremely fast with good fiber and good yield potential. It might not be quite as drought tolerant as DP 1044, but if we can just get a bit more rain, the sky is the limit on what we can make this year. Of course, there are a lot of factors involved when it comes to what our top potential could be.”

Although DP 1212 B2RF is a relative newcomer to the Cotton Belt, Warren has a confidence in it that only comes from familiarity. He has gotten an early look at Deltapine varieties through the years thanks to his involvement in the New Product Evaluator (NPE) program. As an NPE grower, he annually uses a plot of his acreage to plant and evaluate Deltapine variety candidates that are being considered for commercial introduction the following year.

“It’s very advantageous to see these varieties on my own farm instead of just relying on university data,” he says. “It’s really neat to know what they do on our exact conditions and our exact soil types. Because what works on my farm may not work 60 miles from here.”

Choosing the Farm Life

The 2014 crop will be David’s 15th as a cotton producer. He came back to the family farm after graduating from Texas Tech University with an agricultural economics degree. But returning to the homestead wasn’t always the plan.

“I swore I would never go back to the farm,” he says now. “But I just couldn’t find another job that had the family lifestyle that I had growing up, and that I grew to love. And I had the opportunity to come back and farm, so we did it.”

David now lives on the family farm near Lamesa, TX, with his father and brother farming independently nearby. The three men help each other “wherever we can,” according to Warren. He’s joined at home by his wife Jill and children Fallon and Creed.

Though he’s entering year 15 on his own, there are always new challenges with each new season. This year, David says, glyphosate resistance is erupting around him like nothing he’s seen before.

“We’re starting to see some glyphosate resistance in pigweed in farms where it hasn’t been before,” Warren says. “We didn’t see any in 2010, the last time we got good rains, on any of our farms. And we’re starting to see a little of it show up here and there now.

“That’s why we’ve gotten in a very strict regimen of managing our yellow herbicides,” he says. “We’re trying to prevent it. I know a lot of people had gotten lax on their yellow herbicides because of the Roundup Flex system, but we’re all going to have to make a commitment to go back to that to manage it before some of the new tools like the dicamba-tolerance and others become commercially available.”

Like most farmers in West Texas in 2014, Warren can see the positive in having to deal with troublesome weeds for the first time in three growing seasons. In the 2011 and 2013 growing seasons, when his dryland cotton was burned up by the drought, he would’ve been twiddling his thumbs by this point in the year, he says. He bided his time coaching little league baseball and football, among other things. For now, he’s happy to be back working the land – resistant weeds and all.

“We’ve got to be positive, you know,” he says. “Any time the Lord blesses us with rain, we’re called to be stewards of the land, so we’re going to push and do whatever we can do to make a crop.”

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