Bringing In A Golden Cotton Harvest
November 4, 2024 
Joey Bures (Photo: Austin Miller)
You can learn a lot in 50 years of farming. And when you start at age 13, there’s a lot of learning to do.
Just ask Joey Bures.
Bures and his 12-year-old brother planted their first crop in 1974 near their hometown of Ganado, TX. It was, as he explains, an opportunity that fit right in with the family farming history.
Family Traditions
Bures is a third-generation farmer. His grandfather immigrated to south coastal Texas from Czechoslovakia in the late 1800s and started farming with a steam tractor and a turning plow. His dad left the farm for a few years to work in the oil fields but came back to the farm in the 1940s after seeing a one row cotton picker at the Texas State Fair in Dallas.
“He had always picked cotton by hand and didn’t want any more of it,” laughs Bures. “After seeing that picker, he said farming probably wouldn’t be too bad now that it’s been mechanized.”
Fast forward to 1974. Bures and his brother – the last two boys in a family of 12 children – got a visit from their dad at school with an offer.
“He said a neighbor had a farm to rent,” recalls Bures. “He told us that if we wanted to farm it, that we should get after it. So, we left school and worked the land for a couple of weeks, got it planted and started farming.”
The young brothers divided their attention between school and farming together for several years. Bures married his wife Michele in 1978 and soon tragically lost his brother/partner in a farming accident. Bures has been farming on his own ever since.
“We had some tough times in the 1980s but managed to struggle through it,” he recalls.
Four children followed – three boys and a girl. The two oldest sons – Jamie and Heath – wanted to farm, but not until they and their siblings met the conditions set by their parents.
“My wife and I told them they needed to go to college, then work for someone else for a few years,” says Bures. “If they still wanted to farm after that, they could come back. I said it will make them better farmers.”
They did, and not surprisingly, were home on weekends to help out. “They were actually helping us farm and farming on their own all through college – and even when they got jobs,” notes Bures proudly.
Jamie earned his law degree. Heath is a mechanical engineer. The third son, Matthew, is a petroleum engineer who is also involved in the farm, but not day-to-day. Their daughter, Ashley, earned a degree in fashion business and manages her own boutique in Victoria. Her husband Scott also works full time on the farm, and the Bures’ daughters-in-law manage the office and the books.
It’s a true family operation.
“It just makes a lot of difference when you have somebody working with you that has their interest in it, too,” says Bures.
More family involvement also led to farm expansion. Bures says the farm grew from roughly 5,000 acres in the late 1990s to approximately 27,000 acres today. This season, they grew 12,000 acres of cotton,12,000 acres of corn, and about 2,000 acres of rice. Roughly 70% of their row crops are irrigated with poly pipe.
“We drilled our wells and leveled our ground in 2012 so we can get water on it and off of it when we need to,” recalls Bures. “It more than paid for itself in one year.”
50 Years of Cotton Production
Cotton was a big part of Bures’ first crop 50 years ago and is obviously still a mainstay in today’s farming operation. Their 2024 crop may not have turned out to have the golden anniversary results they had hoped for. But, says Bures, all things considered, it turned out to be a good crop.
“We got a lot of rain out of Hurricane Beryl,” he notes. “But the cotton dried out, yielded pretty well, and the grades were good. We were pretty fortunate. It probably would have been the best current crop we’ve had, but we lost anywhere from a half to three fourths of a bale on the bottom.
“But we still averaged about 2.3 bales an acre over 12,000 acres. We were tickled when it was all said and done.”
All of Bures’ 50 crops have been planted to Deltapine varieties – a testament to results that he expects and is comfortable with.
“Since I was a little kid, we’ve planted Deltapine,” says Bures. “My dad always said things can get tough, but if you stay with it, you can still make a crop no matter what. I’ve found that year in and year out, if you stick with it, it’ll stay with you. And the grades are always good.”
Among his favorites, he recalls planting Deltapine 16, DP 555 BGRR, and DP 1646 B2XF. Today, he relies on DP 2020 B3XF. The Bollgard, Roundup Ready, and XtendFlex technologies were big deals to Bures, but the success of the boll weevil eradication program made those technologies much more effective.
“All together, they’ve made cotton farming a whole lot easier,” he says.
Getting an Early Start
The south coastal Texas geography allows growers to get an early start on row crop production each year. Bures generally starts planting corn about February 15, followed by cotton in mid-March. Sometimes, he says, corn planting comes with an audience…and a little bit of fun.
“We have some snowbirds who bring their campers down from the Midwest for the winter,” he says. “We have a lake nearby, and some of them will stay there. We’ll be running our planter by mid-February, and it’s not unusual for folks, say from Iowa, to stop by and ask, ‘What the heck are y’all doing? You don’t plant corn in the wintertime.’”
50 Years of Farming Lessons
Looking back over his 50 years of farming, Bures reflects on how much he didn’t know when he started and some of the life lessons that experience has taught him.
“I’ve learned you have to adapt,” he says. “Things like GPS made life a lot easier and more efficient. If you don’t adapt to some of the new technology, you’ll get passed by and you might be out of business. We’ve gone from cotton trailers to module builders to module pickers. It’s one big change after another. It all costs money, and you have to get big to justify it.
“But our biggest challenge right now is trying to make things work financially,” he adds. “Our inputs are so high. When I got married in 1978, we were getting more for corn than we are now. The margins just aren’t there with the higher interest rates. It’s a thin line.”
But come March, he’ll be back for season 51.
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