While Texas cotton is facing a variety of conditions as wide as the state, this year’s crop is fairing better overall than the last two years.
Agri-Life Extension agronomists say that it is a waiting game right now to see if timely rains come in time to finish out the season. Growers in the panhandle and central Texas say that it could make a world of difference in their late-stage crops.
Hot and dry conditions have prompted some of the state’s cotton bolls to open early, with regions like Coastal Bend and the Rio Grande Valley already wrapping up harvest.
While cotton growers may be zeroed in on their fields and yields at the moment, their balance sheet may need to be of
greater focus.
Cotton Inc. says that ensuring profitability is only getting more difficult in the challenging industry.
According to William Kimbrell, “The cost of producing cotton has increased, and that’s something that the producers, the farmers, are having to deal with, and really as we go forward in this presentation, that’s going to be an area of focus for Cotton Inc. to find ways to help make producers more profitable through both, you know, in the field but also try to bolster consumer demand and pull it all the way through. On this last chart, here again, showing kind of the production costs and how those have continued to rise and how you know production costs obviously have an impact on the producers’ revenue. So, as we see those production costs rise, revenues go down, and obviously, that’s putting more and more pressure on our producers at the farm level.”
Break-even prices are currently sitting in the 90’s and while a rally has brought December cotton prices from recent lows, prices are still trending around 70, well below that break-even.
