The forecast of rains for Texas this week will be music to many farmers and ranchers ears, but the coming stormy weather is not the main El Niño event, according to a climatologist. It’s more like a prelude, said Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon, state climatologist and Regents Professor at Texas A&M University, College Station. Texas is sure to get some rainfall, Nielsen-Gammon said. There’s an upper-level disturbance moving into the southwest, and a tropical cyclone in the Pacific off the coast of Mexico should feed some moisture into the state. Though El Niño may be contributing to the storms, it’s not the beginning of the main activity: the near-normal to wetter-than-normal fall and winter that climatologists are expecting. “Everything is impacted by El Niño in some way or another,” he said. “Some aspects of this weather pattern are consistent with what we expect with an El Niño. We have a fairly active subtropical jet stream developing, which is what brings the wet weather to Texas in the wintertime. The tropical cyclone activity over the eastern Pacific is also characteristic of El Niño.”But the coming wet weather doesn’t mean things have been normal so far, he said. At least 22 counties in Texas have received record low rainfall in the past 90 days. Rainfall the third week in October may help, but it is only expected to average about 2 inches statewide, which may not be enough to end the drought many parts of the state are experiencing.

Ken Legé PhytoGen Cotton Development Specialist Lubbock, Texas   Prior to joining PhytoGen, I had noticed that the germplasm coming out of PhytoGen’s robust West Texas breeding program that will serve the entire Southwest was producing high, consistent yields and was well suited...

On Sept. 10, 2015, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released new rules that could directly affect cotton gins across the country by next year. Most people don’t think of cotton gins as producers of food, but since 2003,...

LA Radio News Sept 29

* Significant increase of production for a range of pest control and seed treatments for plant vigor * Expansion signals company's commitment to solutions beyond conventional crop protection​​ * ​Inaugural event of expanded production site in Littlehampton, UK ​Littlehampton, United Kingdom, October...

September 30th, 2015 Honorees Paved the Way for New Generation of Innovative Cotton Industry Leaders Memphis, TN- Cotton Incorporated announced today the 2015 class of the Cotton Research and Promotion Hall of Fame. The program, now in its second...

Cotton Incorporated has launched a new Web site to give the cotton growing community quick and easy access to important cotton information. Cotton Cultivated provides a portal that integrates Web sites, downloadable documents, social media and real-time news feeds...

If a cotton producer has questions about weed resistance, he will find the answers at the Beltwide Cotton Conferences (BWCC) on Jan. 5-7 in New Orleans. This will be one of the key topics of discussion at the Consultants Conference, as well as the Technical Conferences. Obviously, other issues of interest are on the schedule, but perhaps none is timelier than this expensive problem. Most observers agree that cotton producers have made remarkable progress in understanding this situation and implementing workable strategies. But, there is still much to learn as new technologies become available to cotton production. “The good news is that we’ve made great progress in controlling resistant pigweed in cotton,” says Tom Barber, Arkansas Extension weed specialist and chairman of the BWCC Weed Science Conference. “I think our farmers completely understand the importance of overlapping residual herbicide applications. What has us concerned is some PPO (protoporphyrinogen oxidase) resistance that we’ve discovered in seven counties in Arkansas. Fortunately, they’ve all been in soybean fields and not cotton.” Barber says the big concern is will Reflex herbicide still give farmers the necessary control if the PPO resistance problem moves into cotton fields.

A brief glance at the face of cotton production would indicate that there are a lot of older men growing the crop. But, a deeper look reveals that a new and diverse generation of cotton producers is helping to...

  Lee Hutchins Crop Management, Inc. Sinton, Texas I was raised in north Louisiana in south Bossier Parish and started checking cotton for my aunt and uncle when I was 14. I later graduated from LSU and served in the Army. After...

The National Cotton Council (NCC) is confident persistence will pay off when industry members pursue a zero tolerance goal regarding contamination of seed cotton and lint. Why is contamination such a threat? The NCC believes contamination prevention is so important that...

Considerable ink has been dedicated to China’s cotton consumption for the 2015/16 marketing year and beyond. As the world’s driver of the cotton economy, however, there must be constant analysis. It’s too important a market to neglect or make faulty assumptions on. For this article, I’ve taken a look at the present research from several industry publications, notable market pundits as well as in-house sources. I will fuse together all the information while musing over consumption for the coming year and going forward. To begin, it is essential to have a firm understanding of why we are here. Cotton’s current doldrums began in 2010 when Upland prices reached $2 per pound. The world, including at the time the largest cotton-growing country, China, planted row to row cotton. By the time harvest had rolled around, prices, while still historically high, had ultimately moved lower, prompting the Chinese government to embark on a massive buying program of domestic cotton. Between 2011 and 2013, the Chinese government bought more than 60 million-plus bales with average prices of $1.40 per pound (and higher) and placed it in state reserve warehouses all across the country. Most of the accumulation was domestic cotton, but some imports were repackaged and delivered to the reserves due to the inflated prices.

JORDAN LEA Eastern Trading Company, Greenville, S.C. The kickoff of the college football season means one thing to some but something else to those of us in the cotton industry. The new crop is on the way! The entire global...

When cotton producers across the Belt start harvesting this year’s crop, they’ll do so with several thoughts in mind. They will be thankful that they’ve reached the point where they can see the results of their hard work. And,...