The Oklahoma Cotton Crop has had a rough year with the drought, too much early rain, and not enough as the crop grew. However, Oklahoma State University Cooperative Extension Cotton Agronomist, Dr. Seth Byrd, says harvest is progressing, “I’d say we’ve got a lot of the irrigated crop out if not all of it. Hopefully, for the dryland crop, I’d say a lot of the good stuff is out, but maybe not, according to the classing report. It doesn’t look that bad yet, but there are not a lot of bales that have been classed yet in Oklahoma. So I’d say whatever we have left going into December will be dryland.”
So far, Byrd says there are few reports of a stellar cotton crop, “I think there have been some decent irrigated fields. That’s rarely going to be even 50% of our acres. And, of course, we didn’t have any irrigation around the district or the lake near Altus. So that took out nearly 50,000 acres that would normally be irrigated.”
Byrd said this year’s crops were met with Extremes, either too dry or too wet, “We would like to see that even out better next year. But, of course, price is always going to play a role.”
Byrd said looking ahead, producers have to keep an eye on their costs, “Looking ahead on price, looking ahead to cost of seed, cost of our crop protection inputs, and availability of inputs as well. You know that’s been a problem in the past couple of years. Then we have supply issues we’ve been dealing with on top of everything else.”
In an extreme year like this year for producers, Byrd said certain varieties of cotton could play a role, “In other places in the cotton belt, where they’ve had a better year than we have had, maybe they can gain some knowledge from that. I think it’s tough for us to gain knowledge in a year like this because you hope you don’t see it again.” But Byrd says he’s not surprised that there have been some differences, “You get a year of extremes as we saw in 2022; I’m not surprised there were some extreme differences between the varieties.”
Byrd said it’s been a tough year all around for Cotton producers, “This year unless we figured out a way to make it rain, it wasn’t going to help anybody out.” Byrd advised producers to keep an eye on the market, input prices, and get their plans for next year.
