Setting New Yield Limits

From Cotton Grower Magazine – June 2014

 

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Like many of his neighbors in and around Maury City, TN, cotton producer Tommy Butner grew up around cotton.

For decades he’s been a dryland farmer, relying on usually ample Mid-South rainfall to scratch out his cotton, corn, wheat and bean crops. As any dryland farmer will tell you, though, Mother Nature doesn’t operate on schedule.

While many of the growers in his area have added acreage or installed irrigation systems, Butner has chosen a different path. He says he subscribes to a philosophy of making the most out of the hand he’s been dealt.

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“I had a landlord once who told me something that I think about a lot,” Butner says. “He said ‘Son, it’s not about how much land you work, it’s what you make off of the land you work.’ I have got some good land, and I’m lucky to make good yield off of it. I could be working more land, but it costs the same to put in a rough cheap farm that won’t make, as it does to put in a good farm. You might say I’m just picky.”

That philosophy has paid off in the last two seasons. Over a career that spans a full three decades, Butner made the best crop he’s ever raised in 2012, when he averaged 2.6 bales an acre thanks to a series of timely rains. In 2013, he averaged 2.2 bales an acre, despite having to replant as many as three times due to a wet and cold spring.

“If the weather had cooperated and the fog had lifted, I would have had just as good of a year as 2012,” Butner says. “That’s just how it goes.”

Despite coming just short of his goals, Butner still did so well in 2013 that PhytoGen selected him as the company’s Best Yield Club Winner for Tennessee. It seems ironic that his soaring success the past two years can be traced back to one of the worst crop seasons he ever experienced, just seven years ago.

Westward Bound

The 2007 growing season was a rotten one for Butner – “dry as a bone” as he says. After it became clear that his crop wasn’t going to turn out well, a friend called to see if he wanted to travel to the High Plains of Texas to do some custom harvesting. With a wife and three children at home, Butner was hesitant to leave his Tennessee home, but his friend was persistent.

“They told me the man would furnish the module builders and I’d only need to bring the picker,” Butner says. “I decided to do it, and it turned out to be a good decision. I stayed out in San Angelo, TX, and picked somewhere around 3,300 bales. It was some good cotton.”

Aside from finding some excellent cotton farms, Butner also found great people in the San Angelo area. One of whom, PhytoGen’s Scott Fuchs, naturally started to ask about Butner’s own farm back in Tennessee. As a cotton development specialist for PhytoGen, Fuchs was well versed in how his company’s varieties had been succeeding in the Mid-South.

“We met in 2007 and he started planting PhytoGen that next year,” Fuchs says. “I just got to talking to Tommy and told him about PhytoGen cottonseed. We went to look at some in the field, and he said that he’d try some. Apparently he’s been planting it ever since, and now he’s 100 percent PhytoGen.”

The first variety Butner began planting was PHY 375 WRF. He says he could tell an immediate difference over what he had been planting previously.

“It made good cotton,” Butner says. “I knew early on that I had made a good decision to switch varieties.”

As the years progressed and Butner became more familiar with the variety, he began to see his yields increase.

Resistance Fighting

Water isn’t the only variable growers in west Tennessee must contend with during the growing season. Butner began to see signs of glyphosate resistance in pigweeds on his farm in the early years of the weed pests’ onslaught of his region.

Butner says glyphosate-resistant pigweeds have caused wholesale changes in the way he manages weeds on his farm.

“You’ve got to put out pre-emerge products and you’ve got to overlap your chemicals,” he says. “And no matter what herbicides you’re putting out, you’re still going to have to go out there with a weed crew and chop what escapes. Even if only two percent escape, that could cause you a major headache the next year if you don’t take care of them.

“What it’s done is raise the cost of growing cotton.”

In addition to the pigweed problem, Butner and many in his region also deal with a yearly plant bug invasion. As soon as neighboring corn fields dry down, he sees a spike in the plant bug populations in his cotton field. This, too, can be a costly problem.

“It just costs a lot more now to grow a cotton crop than it did when I first started,” Butner says.

All of the rising inputs put that much more of an emphasis on high yields on Butner’s farm. When he first started in the mid-80s, a yield of 1.5 bales an acre was truly something special.

“I didn’t think I’d ever make two bales an acre when I first got started,” Butner says. “Then in 2001, that was the first time I averaged two bales. Then last year, I averaged over three bales on a pretty good sized field. I think if I could just average 2.6 bales an acre across my whole farm like I did in 2012, I’d be tickled.”

At the suggestion of his local PhytoGen reps, Butner switched much of his acreage into different varieties this season. He’s trying PHY 499 WRF for the first time, and is also planting a new variety, PHY 333 WRF.

“With these new varieties, who knows where the yields might go?” Butner says. “I’m excited to try them out.”

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