By Henry Gantz
Editor
This morning (June 30), USDA said 13.725 million acres of cotton were planted in the U.S. this year, about 1 million acres more than some Cotton Grower trade sources were looking for. It was also 1 million acres higher than USDA’s March 31 projection.
The unexpected news sent New York futures into a tailspin with the December contract dropping by the 500-point daily limit to 116.40 cents per pound.
“The Southeast had a net change of 43,000 acres from the March planting intentions report,” said Arkansas Extension Economist Dr. Scott Stiles. ”The Mid-South was up 50,000 acres, the Far West up 50,000, and then the big change was Texas, up 1 million acres.”
Texas planted 7.1 million acres in 2011, according to USDA, up from 5.55 million in 2010.
“I had to ask myself where this acreage is coming from,” Stiles continued. “I can only account for it because grain sorghum and corn were down a combined 400,000 acres from the March intentions report. So you could say that at least 40 percent of that increase came from acres that were intended to be planted in grain sorghum or corn, but it was just too dry during the planting window for those earlier spring crops to go in.”
Because of drought conditions in the Southeast, extreme drought in the Southwest, and record flooding in the Mid-South, planted acreage will be without a doubt far above harvested acreage. In 2010, USDA said that just less than 11 million acres were planted in the U.S., and 10.699 million were harvested. Texas, for instance, had record low abandonment in 2010 of just less than 4 percent.
This year will be entirely different, according to Steve Verett of the Plains Cotton Growers in Lubbock.
“We won’t have the High Plains district numbers until August to know how much was planted. But we expect something in the 3.9 to 4 million acre range,” he says. “I don’t see any way possible at this point that we won’t be see at least at 40 percent abandonment on the High Plains because we don’t have a dryland crop.
“If you figure that we planted around 4 million acres on the High Plains, and we always say half of it is dryland, that means we’re going to fail somewhere close to 2 million acres.”
Bloomberg reported today that, “Abandonment in the High Plains region, which usually produces about two-thirds of the state’s cotton, may reach 50 percent, the highest since 53 percent of the crop was left to rot in 1992.”
For state-by-state comparisons with other acreage projections, see: www.cotton247.com/acreage/
For USDA’s detailed report for all crops, see: www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/acrg0611.txt