At the Shantz Farm Field Day last week, Associate Farm Editor, Reagan Calk, had the chance to visit with the NexGen Regional Manager, Shane Osborne, about this year’s cotton crop.
According to the latest Oklahoma Crop Progress Report issued by the USDA on October 2, cotton conditions rated 9 percent good to excellent, 28 percent fair, and 63 percent poor to very poor. In the week prior, conditions rated 14 percent good to excellent, 25 percent fair, and 61 percent poor to very poor.
“It has been a very rough year,” Osborne said. “We actually started out with decent potential, but to be quite honest, the heat this year has been overwhelming. We have had an abundance of heat from early on.”
Many areas, Osborne said, never received rainfall amounts substantial enough to develop or store water in the soil profile.
“That storage in the profile- we rely heavily on that to make cotton in Oklahoma both for dryland, of course, but also the irrigated acre depends heavily on that storage in the profile,” Osborne said. “Our best crops come from a combination of irrigation and storage. When we don’t have that, it is going to be a very tough year.”
Cotton harvest is getting close, Osborne said, as some producers are beginning to apply harvest aids.
“If we continue to have open weather, it will be pretty quick,” Osborn said. “Unfortunately, a lot of that harvest is happening without a stripper or a picker. It is going on with a shredder because those acres are failing. It is going to be pretty tough this year on a harvested acre number for Oklahoma.”
Regarding those harvest aid applications, Osborne gave some insight into what he recommends.
“We still find the best results when growers will run a boll opener with a defoliant,” Osborne said. “When those top harvestable bolls are mature, and the seeds within those bolls are mature, we want to trigger that harvest aid application, that boll opener, and use a defoliant to remove those leaves and condition that plant. When we do that, our fiber quality goes up, our yields are maintained, and we see the best results there.”
After stripping the cotton, Osborne said following with a desiccant will help to dry the plant.
Osborne also touched on harvest discipline and said it would be a mistake to harvest when the humidity is too high.
“We can bring on some fiber quality issues ourselves by making some poor decisions in that area, so when we are stripping, we want that humidity to be low, when we are picking, we can stand a little bit more, but we better be paying attention to that number,” Osborne said. “That helps us deliver good quality cotton to the gin, and that keeps the ginner happy and the farmer as well.”
