Cotton Commitment Begins at Home
January 12, 2010 
Mark Williams of Farwell, TX, () has spent countless hours and traveled thousands of miles representing the U. S. Cotton Industry.
Williams has served as president of the Plains Cotton Growers, advisor to Cotton Council International and the National Cotton Council, and as chairman of the American Cotton Producers of the National Cotton Council. As a member of the Executive Committee of the Cotton Board, he is Chairman of the Strategic Assessment Committee, while also serving on the Global Strategy and Implementation Committee.
And that’s just a start — Williams is just as active on the local and state levels.
It takes a special person to give as much to the industry as Williams has, but he’ll be the first to tell you, with emphasis, that his service comes with a caveat: “I could never have done it without my son being here and without a wife that is supportive. Whatever it is for your operation — a son or another family member — that’s the key. They have to look after things while you’re gone.”
Thanks to his family, Williams has the key.
He and his wife, Joyce, have three sons — Ryan, Reagan and Russell.
Ryan, 34, is involved in the farming operation and lives right across the road from his Mom and Dad with his wife, Annie, and their two children — Erica (8) and Walker (4). “It is good to have young and energetic blood in our operation. It is all I can do to try to keep up with Ryan’s aggressive style of farm management. He has added new enterprises to our farm such as custom silage harvesting that has benefited our operation a great deal.”
Russell, 30, is with Farm Bureau in Washington, DC. “I’m not so sure Russell doesn’t have farming in the back of his mind, but I don’t know if it’ll happen or not,” says Williams.
Reagan, 32, is living at home after spending time in the Army in Bosnia and is now considering law school.
Williams’ sister, Tracy, and her husband, Kendall Devault, live next door and farm as well.
Another sister, Lee Ann Blackford, is a veterinarian in Knoxville, TN.
Although he doesn’t remember the exact details, when the call came from the cotton industry asking for his help, Williams answered.
“There was an issue that came up at our local Farm Bureau. Someone called me and said it was something I needed to be involved in,” he says. “I don’t remember now what the issue was, but that’s when I realized that I needed to become involved.
“It’s interesting to do that kind of work and meet the kind of people I do. I just regard it as extremely important.”
We at Cotton Grower agree. So, for his outstanding and tireless contributions to the U. S. cotton industry, our staff takes great pleasure in naming Mark Williams our 2009 Cotton Achievement Award Winner.
Steve Verett is Executive Vice President of the Plains Cotton Growers (PCG), Inc., in Lubbock, TX, and the 2005 Cotton Grower Cotton Achievement Award winner. Williams served as president of PCG in 2002 and 2003, and has been a friend and business associate of Verett’s for many years.
“Mark Williams has been a long-time leader in the cotton industry at the local, state and national levels,” says Verett. “One of Mark’s strengths is that when approaching a problem, he is almost always the person who asks, ‘Why not?’, instead of ‘Why?’. His ability to think outside the box has been a big part of his success in farming and leadership.”
Drayton Mayers, President and CEO of the Memphis-based Cotton Board, says, “Mark is a solid leader with great experience. He brings a great skill set to the Cotton Board, especially given his experience as president of the Plains Cotton Growers and as Chairman of the American Cotton Producers.
“Mark enjoys strategic planning, looking to the future and doing what’s best for the cotton supply chain. He’s fiscally conservative, but very open minded in terms of ideas that drive the industry forward. It’s great to have those two things to help guide any organization, but specifically the Cotton Research and Promotion Program.”
Adds Craig Brown, NCC Vice President of Producer Affairs, “It’s always a sign of respect and recognition when your peers choose to elect you to a national position. Such has been the case for Mark Williams. The American Cotton Producers elected him as its chairman in 2002/03 during a farm bill implementation period, plus our industry’s involvement in critical trade policy issues. Mark served diligently as ACP chairman while confronting serious health issues. He’s been doing so ever since.
“He serves as an advisor to the CCI Executive Committee and as an Advisor to the NCC Board, which places him in the center of the debate on all critical policy issues. He is well deserving of this honor.”
Essential Support
Williams says if the cotton industry is to be maintained, support of its organizations is essential.
“The Cotton Board funds the research and promotion of cotton, and that is critical,” he explains. “The National Cotton Council is extremely important in maintaining a good cotton program.”
“Every time we have a new farm bill, it seems like there are all these critics out there about the U.S. cotton industry. I think it’s totally unwarranted. We have to stay on our toes and make sure we keep a good program with a good enough safety net so that people aren’t scared away from growing cotton.”
The U.S. cotton program is in the crosshairs of critics, both foreign and domestic.
“We’re seen as a rich country that has it all,” says Williams. “In their minds, we subsidize to the detriment of poor farmers in Africa.”
A glaring example of how untrue this is, he says, is China.
“They subsidize their producers to the tune of 80-some-odd-cents-per-pound, and yet the rest of the world is griping about us because we’re subsidizing at 52 cents,” explains Williams. “How does that make sense?
“We in this country know that what goes on in China and India is way more critical to the world price of cotton than what goes on here. They are the ones who determine the cotton market. It’s not the acreage we grow here anymore, and I think that’s been proven in the last few years.”
Williams is also Chairman of his area’s boll weevil eradication program. While some zones fought bitterly over whether to fund eradication programs, Williams’ zone was created before boll weevils became a problem.
“John Saylor, who is a good friend and neighbor, and I worked on getting it started, and we are proud of the success of the program,” he says. “We knew boll weevils were coming from the south and we thought it would be best to be proactive. And sure enough, within a year or two, we would have been deluged with weevils. We aren’t catching any weevils here at all, and our assessment has gone way down. We feel like it has been a big success.”
And he helped with the creation of the Southwest Council of Agribusiness.
“We saw the need in Texas to bring together all the commodity organizations to lobby as one and to hire a good lobbyist to represent us,” Williams says. “We met with Chip Morgan of Delta Council and Frank Mitchner to talk about how Delta Council was set up.”
Delta Council is an economic development organization based in Stoneville, MS. Morgan is executive vice president. Mitchner is a retired Sumner, MS, cotton grower who has been active in most all of the cotton organizations on the local to national levels.
“Delta Council is far more encompassing of industries besides agriculture. Our organization is strictly agriculture. From our standpoint, it’s not just farmers who care about farm policy. It’s the people who live in the towns, too,” Williams continues. “All of these people have to come together to support the Southwest Council of Agribusiness so that when we go to visit with people in Washington, we can tell them we represent the whole area, and we think we can do a much better job of lobbying when we do that.”
A Life’s Work in Cotton
Both sets of Williams’ grandparents moved to west Texas from Oklahoma in the 30s, established homesteads and began farming dryland crops, mostly as feed for horses and cattle. In the 50s, both of his grandfathers began growing cotton, and his dad, Bert, followed suit.
But it was not until Williams was at Texas Tech in Lubbock that he decided cotton farming would also be his life’s work.
“I didn’t know I wanted to go into farming until I was at Tech,” explains Williams, who graduated in 1974 with a degree in agricultural economics. “I thought I wanted to be an attorney. Something changed my mind, but I can’t say exactly what it was. I started in ag economics, so I guess I really didn’t think too hard about being a lawyer.”
It’s much easier to tell you which of the Williams family didn’t attend Texas Tech than who did. All but Reagan, who graduated from the University of Houston with a degree in political science, are Red Raiders.
Joyce was enrolled at Texas Tech at the same time as Williams, but they actually met on a ski trip to Ruidoso, NM, and were married in 1973.
Today, the Williams farm 1,650 acres of cotton, 2,600 of corn, 300 of green beans and the rest is in wheat, for a total of 10,000 acres. They have a 3,000-head stocker-calf operation and lease grazing ground for another 2,000 head.
Williams’ operation is in a very unique area of the Cotton Belt. Located 90 miles northwest of Lubbock and one mile east of Clovis, NM, Farwell is at an elevation of 4,200 feet above sea level at the upper end of the Caprock. By comparison, Lubbock is at 3,400 feet above sea level. “I don’t think there’s any cotton grown at any higher elevation,” Williams says.
At that level, it’s windy, heat units are sometimes hard to find late season, and to top it off, water is in short supply. Yet the area still produces high-yielding, high quality cotton.
“At one time, everybody looked at our county (Parmer) and said, ‘Y’all have all the water in the world,’” Williams says. “But the water table dropped very fast. When you grow corn and wheat and have to water as extensively as we did, it dropped five feet a year. This area has really run out of water now, except for certain pockets.”
Williams conserves water through rotation, strip tillage and creative irrigation techniques.
With irrigation, it’s doing the most with the least. Williams has a section (640 acres) with 10 50-gallon-per-minute wells and four center pivots. All are interconnected with underground plastic pipe and a series of valves. By shutting off water to three of the pivots and directing it all to one pivot, that pivot can then put out 500 gallons per minute.
“Rotation with wheat is another way we get the most efficient use of our water,” says Williams. “We’ll harvest wheat then summer fallow. We won’t plant cotton again on that ground until the next spring.
“We have land that has not been plowed for eight years,” he continues. “We have to plan two years ahead with our water.”
After a season of fallow, Williams strip tills and plants cotton into the wheat stubble. The stubble protects it from blowing sand and helps collect and preserve moisture, but strip tillage can create weed-control problems since a yellow herbicide is not applied. “Roundup Ready technology is critical for what I do. I’d hate for us to have resistant pigweed out here because that’s my major weed,” Williams says. “I do not want to go back to plowing because moisture is critical and every time we plow, we lose an inch of moisture.”
Williams has also used Liberty Link technology and says results have been weather-dependent: “Liberty Link does not work well when it’s dry, and our springs have been dry. When it gets wetter in the summer, it works fine.”
In areas where glyphosate resistance is a problem, growers have been returning to more traditional weed-control programs to preserve Roundup Ready technology, and that has included using incorporated yellow herbicides.
“We can’t use a yellow herbicide because we don’t plow to incorporate it,” Williams says. “We’re looking at some new chemistries, like Clarity, that may be in the new stacked traits. That will be critical and I hope it gets here before weed resistance is more widespread. We’re using some of the new chemistry on our corn now, and we know how it works.”
Even though Williams is not in an area where bollworms are considered a major pest, he uses varieties with the Bollgard II trait. And it seems that every company that can even spell “trait,” is working on one in common: drought tolerance. “That one can come none-too-soon for me,” says Williams. “If it’s good enough, it could make dryland cotton farming more viable.”
A precision application technology that lends itself well to the way Williams rotates and uses strip till is GPS. “We’re using GPS extensively,” he says. “We run our strip-till rigs with GPS and we come right back in with the planter in that very same spot. Using GPS is the only way we could strip till. We plant everything flat – nothing is bedded up.”
Sea Change
What Williams says was a “sea change” in yields and quality came when varieties bred for the High Plains of Texas became available.
“You have to point to FiberMax and what they did. Their varieties were bred in a desert climate and we have a desert climate,” he explains. “Our yields and quality just shot up. Everybody points to us now as the top of Upland cotton quality instead of the bottom, where we used to be.
“It has really been about FiberMax, but Deltapine has been trying to adapt to our area, and they seem to have developed some good new varieties. Deltapine and NexGen both have varieties that have yielded as well as FiberMax.”
Ryan Williams participated in Deltapine’s 2009 New Product Exposure program. On December 12, Deltapine named its Class of ’10 varieties in Charleston, SC, and Ryan was in attendance.
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