It’s been said that the first 40 days of a cotton plant’s life are the most important. That may be true, but it’s hard to remember the first 40 days by the time you get to September and Tropical...
“I’m just a cotton pickin’ Coast girl with a camera and a pen.”
I didn’t grow up around cotton and didn’t know what a boll of cotton looked like until I was 18 years of age in 1978, as...
We live in Wayne County, North Carolina, where my great-grandfather, E.K. Sanderson, and my grandfather, Joe Sanderson, grew cotton for a long time before the boll weevil came in.
People in our area got away from cotton for a...
Can you say a building watches over a community? Well, I think it can and I know one that does.
These days in a part of Texas where most people don’t naturally think “cotton,” sits a building whose history was...
Well, it’s time for another Farm Bill to make its way through Congress. It sure would be nice to get it out early so we can see what we’ve got to work with.
Georgia producers didn’t want to change what...
I was raised on a farm in Arkansas, but we didn’t grow cotton. When I went to college, somebody said I should take an entomology class. I didn’t know what that was, but I enjoyed it and decided to...
When I was a young boy, I went everywhere with my grandfather and daddy, constantly bugging them to let me drive everything. I wanted so badly to be a farmer.
One day we were walking through the John Deere dealership....
Like many kids growing up in the Missouri Bootheel, cotton was the center of our lives. It drew the whole community together. From everyday lunches at the local grocery store to “cotton tales” so memorable they have lived on...
During the late 1950s through the early ’70s, I was blessed to grow up in the Coastal Bend region of Texas in a farming community called West Sinton, which was composed of a church, a grocery store and a...
Like many, I am the product of a cotton farmer — a very successful cotton farmer. Successful, not wealthy. A dirt farmer, not a planter. Our father, the son of a sharecropper.
He told me at an early age, “Whatever...
We at Cotton Farming would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the My Turn column through the years. Many of our readers have told us this is their favorite page in the magazine.
As we embark on a...
I am from Golden Meadow in South Louisiana — the land of swamps, moss, shrimp and crawfish. Outside of seafood, sugarcane was the main plantation-harvested food. The first time my family and I traveled through an area with cotton...
I love cotton. I come from three generations of cotton folks, but not on the farming side. Both sets of my grandparents worked in central Alabama cotton mills — Avondale Mills to be exact. My father’s parents worked in...
I’ve always enjoyed reading “My Turn” for the personal insights and common experiences shared by those of us associated with cotton. While cotton experiences serve as the warp of these personal stories, the weft is always enriched by individuals...
Although I was born in the suburbia of our nation’s capital, my parents shouldn’t have been surprised I ended up in agriculture. My dad grew up on a subsistence farm in Pennsylvania, and mom’s grandfather owned the only gin...
