Abundant snow and rain this winter have boosted soil moisture levels across the US cotton belt, guaranteeing a robust start to the crop in 2010. The moisture is particularly plentiful in Texas, the biggest cotton growing US state, where farmers normally have to scramble to wring water from wells or pray for rain to get crops like cotton sprouting during the spring.
"If you look at this time last year, we were bone dry," Travis Miller, the associate department head of Texas A&M University's soil and crop sciences department, told Reuters in an interview. "We lost a big chunk of the crop to drought (in 2009)."
This year, the situation has flipped around, due to an abnormally cold and wet winter in the US Southwest and into the Eastern Seaboard. Texas is particularly critical because it planted more than half of all the cotton sown in the United States in 2009
A moderate to strong El Nino weather anomaly, which usually wreaks havoc in weather patterns around the Asia-Pacific region, has funnelled rain into the southern US cotton belt. The US Climate Prediction Center, an office of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, said in a monthly report more rain will likely hit cotton areas in the spring.
COTTON PLANTINGS TO RISE Miller said the net effect of all the rain is that farmers in Texas who were thinking of sowing corn would probably switch to cotton instead. "There is a good chance it will increase the acres of cotton," said Miller. He also said there were additional inducements - the "attractive price of cotton and (with) delayed plantings of corn ... you can plant cotton."
The amount planted to cotton in Texas in 2009 reached 5.018 million acres, which was 55 percent of the 9.05 million acres sown to cotton in the United States. That total acreage was a 25-year low. US 2010 cotton sowings are expected by the government and most farmers to rebound to around 10 million acres because of higher cotton prices and prospects that demand will increase as the global economy recovers.
Comments
Comments are closed.