2009 a bad year for Bootheel cotton farming

SIKESTON, Mo. -- Many Missouri farmers are seeing bumper crop yields this year but area cotton farmers would be happy just to be able to get their crops out of the field.

Frequent rains -- and now, cool temperatures -- have delayed the cotton harvest by weeks.

Jeff House, agronomy specialist for the University of Missouri Extension in New Madrid County, said he can't recall seeing conditions this difficult for a cotton harvest since 1973 when he was growing up.

"It's going to be a tough harvest," House said. "We've had hard cotton harvests before but this one is going to be really tough."

Cotton ginning in this area usually begins around the first of October but it may be around Nov. 1 before it starts this year, according to Doug Moore, gin manager for the Bootheel Cotton Company in Matthews.

"Normally we would already be ginning by this time and I'm looking at, at least, another week, and maybe two weeks, before we start ginning any cotton," Moore said. "It takes warm, dry weather to make a boll open. By being cool, it has slowed down cotton's growth and made it a late crop; it can't mature any more."

"I don't know of any cotton picked yet," House said. "Usually we're way on down the line, if not pretty much done, by this time of year."

The late harvest is not only because of a wet autumn, "but also due to a wet spring," Moore noted. "It delayed the planting, which made for a later crop to start with. They got hit on both ends."

"This year is a little wetter than normal," said meteorologist Dave Purdy of the National Weather Service in Paducah, Ky., "but nothing unusual."

While the total rainfall hasn't been much above the average for the year, it has been coming at the worst times for area cotton farmers.

"Cotton defoliation was also delayed," House said. Defoliation, he explained, is the process of chemically removing the cotton plants' leaves to prepare the crop for harvesting.

Now that it is time to harvest the cotton, rainfall in the Sikeston area hasn't been record-breaking but, at 5.88 inches recorded in October as of Monday, is already well above the month's average of 3.33 inches, according to Purdy.

With cotton still in the field, "the grade is going down on it every time it gets rained on," House said.

Moore said he is expecting to gin 25 percent less cotton than last year. The weather is largely to blame but part of the reduced volume is due to market forces. With both low cotton prices and high grain prices, "some of our cotton acres went to grain," he said.

There have also been reports of boll rot, House said, which is a fungus which rots the cotton inside the boll before it has a chance to open.

Cotton farmers haven't completely given up hope, however.

"If we can get some sun, like we got today, and some wind we stand a pretty good chance," House said. "If we could get a week to 10 days of dry weather, the landscape is going to change pretty fast."

And that is a change area cotton farmers could definitely live with.

"It's kind of amazing in a way: a few years ago I was getting calls from reporters wanting to talk about how good cotton crops are," House said. "Now I've got reporters calling asking, 'How bad is it?' Cotton farmers have a saying: 'Cotton giveth and cotton taketh away.'"