For Sentinel, Oklahoma cotton farmer Jimmy Rhoades, the start of the 2025 harvest is bringing a welcome dose of optimism after a challenging previous season. An initial field test this week has him hopeful for a significantly better crop.
“I took my stripper, I loaded it up to Dill City yesterday and made one round,” Rhoades said. “And that one round made me very happy.”
That single pass yielded three round bales, which Rhoades estimates could translate to an impressive two-and-a-quarter to two-and-a-half bales per acre for his dryland cotton. “That’s very good,” he noted. The projection is a stark contrast to the previous year’s results. “Last year I made two-thirds to three-quarters of a bale an acre,” Rhoades explained. “This year… it’s almost three to four times the amount of cotton as we made last year.”
Preparing for Harvest
The promising yield comes after a season that required patience. Late August rains, while welcome, delayed the crop’s maturity. “We got a lot of rain in late August… which made us put on a lot of top crop,” Rhoades said. “So we’re a little bit behind getting started on cotton harvest because we made a lot of late bolls and a lot of green leaves.”
To get the crop ready, Rhoades has begun applying harvest aids. He explained it’s a multi-step chemical process to prepare the plant for stripping, which typically takes about 14 days.
“The spraying has three purposes,” he stated. “One is to speed up maturity of the bolls. Two is to try to drop the foliage off. And the second spraying will be to try to kill the plant to take the greenness out of it.”
Killing the plant is a crucial step for quality. “If that plant is green, them brushes and stuff that harvest the crop will try to peel off the bark,” Rhoades said. “And that makes bad grades.”
Beating the Weather and the Market
While some farmers might wait for the first freeze to naturally defoliate the cotton plants, Rhoades says that’s a risk he can’t afford to take with his large acreage.
“The last thing I want to do is wait on a freeze,” he said, recalling a past year when an early December snowstorm left ice on the fields until March. “That would deteriorate the cotton, the grades, the classing, and we just don’t want to get into that.”
Even with a strong yield, profitability remains a challenge. The current market is around 64 cents per pound, but the final payment is heavily dependent on quality.
“If you got real good grades, you’ll get the 64 or better. But if your grades come off, it goes to deducted off the price,” Rhoades explained. Despite the tough economics, the strong harvest is a major step in the right direction.
“That’s tremendous. I mean, that’s better than I thought,” Rhoades said of his initial yield test. “We’re going to yield a little bit of profit maybe this year, but it’s tough out here… Just hopefully we can pay our operating loans off.”
