Arkansas Growers Wary of Cotton’s “Wet Feet”
With most Arkansas cotton in the ground, growers are now contending with high soil moisture and the prospect of stunted plants if things don’t dry out soon.
Zachary Treadway, Extension Cotton and Peanut Agronomist for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, says that the near-weekly rain events Arkansas has experienced throughout the spring delayed many growers’ planting efforts while punishing those who managed to plant their cotton early.
“Some stuff that got in early got a lot of water,” Treadway says. “Cotton, as a crop, does not like to have ‘wet feet,’ staying wet and sitting in water.”
Treadway says some growers will likely see a certain degree of plant stunting and other negative effects correlated with cotton roots subjected to excess water.
“I haven’t looked at a hard number, but I think we can count rain in feet, rather than inches, this spring,” he notes. “It almost feels like it’s rained about every other day.”
In its March 30 Prospective Planting Report, USDA estimated Arkansas growers would plant 580,000 acres of cotton in 2025. Treadway doubts the state will see that number come to fruition. Ruined plants are far more likely to be replanted with soybeans than cotton, and repeated weather delays have left many growers with the unappealing prospect of planting cotton well into the summer.
“A lot of producers just don’t like the taste of planting June cotton,” Treadway says. “I think we’ll see a lot of that cotton ground claimed on insurance as prevented planting or swapped to something like soybeans, which have a slightly later window.”
According to USDA data as of June 22, nearly 21% of the state’s cotton crop had begun squaring (developing flower buds), placing it nearly 20 percentage points behind the five-year average. Treadway says that all is not necessarily lost if the state can catch a break in the weather.
“I’ve seen some real pretty cotton that can handle the weather well,” he states. “If we could miss some rains and it could heat up some, we’ll be just fine and have the potential to make a very good crop this year.”
Lower Expectations Nationally
USDA has lowered its expectations for the 2025-26 U.S. cotton crop, however.
“Pointing to the excessive rain and planting delays in the Delta, harvested acreage was lowered 2% this month to 8.19 million acres,” reports Scott Stiles, Extension Agricultural Economics Program Associate for the Division of Agriculture.
“The national average yield for 2025-26 was reduced more than 1% from last month to 820 pounds per acre, also because of the conditions in the Delta,” he says. “As a result, the production forecast was reduced 500,000 bales to 14.0 million – below the 14.4 million bales produced in 2024-25 and the second smallest crop in the past decade.”
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