Georgia farmers haven’t given up yet on their 1997 cotton and
soybean crops. But
unrelenting fall and now winter rains are taking their toll.
University
of Georgia agricultural scientists say many fields will
never be picked.
“I’ve seen pickers and planters running in the same field
before. We might see
that again this year,” said Phillip
Roberts, an entomologist with the UGA College of
Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
But the Georgia Agricultural Statistics Service has revised
its harvested-acreage
estimates for both cotton and soybeans.
The new estimates allow for 10,000 cotton acres and 20,000
soybean acres to be
abandoned unharvested, said crops statistician Jerry Midden.
Both figures double earlier
estimates.
UGA economists say the figures represent $8 million in lost
income to the state’s
farmers — $5.5 million for cotton and $2.5 million for
soybeans. As painful as those
figures are, they only add insult to the greater injuries from
the soaking rains.
The steady rains have pulled some lint out of the bolls
onto the ground. It has stained
much of the rest, causing price deductions for the quality
loss. Over the state’s 1.44
million acres of cotton, yield and quality losses may amount
to as much as $200 million.
“The latest (U.S. Department
of Agriculture)
estimates put our yield at 638 pounds per acre,” said UGA
economist Don
Shurley. “That’s about 100 pounds
lower than earlier estimates.”
Steve Brown,
a UGA Extension Service
cotton specialist, said the state cotton harvest stands at
1.85 million bales.
“We don’t know how many more are out there, but I think
we’ll probably reach 1.9
million,” he said. “Folks are still out there fighting to get
it in.”
Harvesting what’s left, though, won’t be easy.
“The main problem since early November is just that the
fields are too wet to
support the harvest equipment,” he said. “Since Sept. 25, most
of the
cotton-growing areas have had 40 inches of rain. And they’ve
seldom had three or four
straight open days during that whole time.”
When the unseasonal rains began, Brown said, the cotton
harvest had been in full swing
for less than a week.
“If the rains had started just a week later than they did,”
he said,
“the picture now would have been much prettier. As it is,
there are still several
thousand bales out there.”
With each bale worth $200 to $300 even at the lower-quality
prices, farmers are
struggling to keep the harvest going.
“We’ve still got some good cotton out there,” Brown
said. “And farmers
are doing everything they can to get it out of their fields.”
