Born in Cotton

Nearly two centuries ago – the year was 1827, to be exact – a patch of ground near Shellman, GA, was surveyed and mapped. In 1830, the first cotton crop was planted on it, and it has seen its share of cotton ever since, says Jimmy Curry, patriarch of today’s Curry Farms.

“I’ve been in farming since the day I was born, just about. My grandfather on my mother’s side moved over here and farmed with my daddy,” he says. “But as far back as you can go on both sides, they farmed and grew cotton.

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“They all started out in North Carolina and they grew cotton over there.”

But the land became unproductive, as did thousands of acres in the Southeast and Mid-South, before the advent of inorganic fertilizers.

“So they moved south and west,” Curry continues. “My family settled down here in the 1830s, so my family has been growing cotton a long time.”

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In the early ’60s, Curry attended Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, GA, but returned home in 1962 after his father suffered a heart attack. “I came home and got a taste of it and I never went back. That was the first year we bought a cotton picker, and I ran it,” he says. “Right before that, we still had 200 acres that were worked with mules.”

His son Bubba, who also grew up on the farm, joined the operation for good 1992 after graduating from the University of Georgia.

“Bubba graduated on a Saturday, and Sunday morning he was on a tractor helping me plant cotton. He’s been there ever since,” Jimmy Curry says. “We pool equipment and labor now, but we have separate crops. I guess I could do it without Bubba, but I wouldn’t want to.”

The Curry’s own a 50% interest in Quality Gin, in Shellman, and Jimmy’s daughter and Bubba’s sister Beth Curry McMath runs it. Bubba’s wife Kim and Jimmy’s wife Martha are also very much involved in the operation.

“This is a real family business,” says Bubba.

In addition, they also own Curry Farm Supply near Shellman.

Resistance Rerun

It’s almost a given these days in the Southeast that cotton growers will face glyphosate-resistant pigweed, and the Currys have not been spared. They’ve also had their ins and outs with hooded sprayers.

“With the resistance problems we’re having now, we have to get into the cotton so much faster,” says the Curry’s consultant Kevin Cotton of Leesburg, GA. “So we had to have a better hood to do an early post-direct. The older hoods just aren’t sufficient anymore. Before we got resistance issues, we were able to spray Roundup over the top all the way to layby.”

Bubba Curry adds that, “We put the old hooded sprayers up – we hated them. We bought a set of hoods two or three years ago. But they just weren’t designed for what we needed to do.”

Today they run Willmar hooded sprayers designed in conjunction with Monsanto, based on grower input.

“We’re managing resistance as best we can. Right now, like everybody else, we’re using PPOs,” Cotton continues. “We use Reflex, and we use a good bit of Valor on the strip-tilled land, followed up by Diuron. We try to get in and run Dual Magnum or Warrant with the first post application. We’ve got some pigweed issues, but Bubba and Jimmy have done a real good job. There are other areas that are just eaten up.

“If you go by the amount of hand labor that I see around here, we’re just nowhere close on this farm. For the most part, we’ve got a handle here on pigweed.”

No matter what, Cotton says the biggest issue is timeliness. “Bubba does a good job of staying on top of it,” he adds. “Plus his crop rotation helps because we can mix different chemistries, like getting atrazine out. So far, we don’t have any atrazine resistance – just ALS and glyphosate.”

The Currys start the year out with a burndown.

“Bubba used Valor and Roundup this year,” Cotton says. “Under the hoods, it just depends on the situation – you can just put out whatever it calls for. On some of the conventional till, there will be some Gramoxone put out. And we always use a residual with everything.”

In the past, they planted everything in a cover crop. Then they’d burn it down and strip-till it. “But since we’ve gotten these resistance issues, we’ve gone back a lot more to conventional tillage to incorporate our DNAs,” Bubba says. “We never got away from DNAs, but sometimes we had to put them out behind the press wheel.”

At planting, the residuals Reflex and Direx are used.

Cotton says that where Valor is used as a burndown, it’s usually followed by Diuron and Staple.

“The first post application will generally be with Roundup and Dual Magnum, or Roundup and Warrant over the top,” he adds. “We’ll have some fields that will require a second post application, and the ideal way to put it out is under the rows. If you’ve used Roundup and Dual or Warrant, you might want to come in with Cotoran the second time. And we still layby everything, mostly with Diuron, MSMA and crop-oil.”

Spreading The Risk

All totaled Bubba and Jimmy farm 6,000 row-crop acres, with 3,000 acres dedicated to cotton in 2011. In addition to cotton in their row-crop operations, the Currys grow peanuts, wheat and soybeans. They also have 300 head of “mama cows,” as Bubba calls them. Jimmy has 600 acres of pecan trees.

Bubba says the ideal crop rotation on their operations would one year each of cotton, corn and peanuts.

They are nearly 90% irrigated, which sounds better than Mother Nature allows. “The way our irrigation is, we can’t plant as much corn as we’d like because of water limitations,” Bubba explains.

The Currys spread the risk by planting a number of varieties: Deltapine’s DP 1050, DP 1048 B2RF along with PhytoGen’s PHY 565 WRF and PHY 375 WRF.

But Jimmy says there was other additional factors just as important as seed selection.

“I’ll tell you one thing for sure – we couldn’t get enough Temik for reniform nematodes,” he explains. “I think I could document a 200-pound lint yield difference.

Bubba says the “most consistent variety was DP 1050 B2RF, followed by what he calls close seconds – DP 1048 and PHY 565.

“In the other’s defense, some were stressed for water,” says Jimmy. “We had water run out at a critical time in some of the fields.”

And Bubba was “most impressed” with PhytoGen PHY 499 WRF, which was available in only limited supplies in 2011. “That’s a brand new variety and we didn’t have but 10½ acres in a test plot,” he says. “We estimate it’s going to make 1,500 pounds or better.

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