Benefits and Big Picture from West Texas
October 13, 2010 
New Product Evaluator Program: Benefits and Big Picture from West Texas
Blaine Nichols stepped out of the row and smiled. After yet another trip through his West Texas fields, he was feeling encouraged with both his crop and his New Product Evaluator (NPE) test plots.
“It’s nice to go out and not just have two rows of cotton to look at,” says Nichols, who grows cotton with his father, Mark, near Seminole, Texas. “When you have a full three to five acres of cotton you can feel good about the next year choosing a variety that has never been grown on a commercial scale before.”
Blaine goes through the cotton every week and says there’s a lot to learn over the course of the year.
“The benefit is having more than just a hand-picked bag of cotton that you take to a hand-gin,” says Nichols. “We actually run it through our gin with all the same processes as does a whole field of cotton. So we’re able to get input from our ginner and see a full module.”
This larger-scale test, coupled with the fact that it’s local, is what makes the Deltapine New Product Evaluator (NPE) program make a difference for both cotton growers and Deltapine’s ability to serve them with quality varieties.
“They really like seeing data from their own farm,” says Eric Best, agronomist for Deltapine. “So when they get to look at five, 10, 15 – acre blocks on their own farm, that has a lot more relevance for them, under their growing conditions, for how those things perform in their operation.”
According to Best, when you are able to roll this kind of data up and evaluate how seed performs under different conditions all across cotton country it offers Deltapine the ability to bring better seed to market sooner.
Best says, “That’s a tremendous tool for us to make sure we’re picking things that are going to be most consistent for those growers in different areas all across the ‘Belt.”
In the early morning near Brownfield, Texas, Russell Lepard is smiling as he examines his NPE plots with Larry Martin, his Deltapine representative.
Lepard says having a larger acreage for the Deltapine NPE tests enables him to form a better picture of exactly how a new variety might perform under all the different conditions.
“A big word for us is consistency, whether it’s yield, or grades – all the quality issues, the way that the cotton handles throughout the year in managing it with PGRs (plant growth regulators), with fertilizer, with water. Explains Lepard, “with the larger acreage it allows you to have a more true test of what might actually happen on a total field.”
Both Lepard and Nichols feel they will be able to benefit from what they are learning and plan to share that information with their neighbors.
“By moving some of their trials out here they are finding varieties that do fit us better, through the NPE program,” says Nichols. “I feel like we specifically have somebody looking out for our interests here in West Texas.”
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