Farmers not happy with 'lousy' crop of cotton
By BRENDA SOMMER bsommer@leader-news.com

As expected, the summer-long nonstop rains that ended Texas' drought took their toll on Wharton County's cotton crop.

From late June through August, blooming cotton plants need sunshine and heat to make and keep bolls. Instead, the young stead, the young plants spent weeks under cloudy skies in acres of mud and standing water with no chance to dry out. This caused bolls at the bottom of the plant - typically where the best quality and highest-yield cotton is located - to drop.

Although the cotton plants did bloom and make bolls again once the sun returned, the damage was done.

Jimmy Roppolo, Farmers Coop of El Campo general manager, called this year's cotton crop "lousy."

"We'll probably close the El Campo gin in the next hour or so," Roppolo said Friday. "Our Hillje gin is running 24 hours and will probably close in another week - we still have some cotton that hasn't been picked."

"Yields are all over the board. Some made two bales or a bit more, but that was uncommon. We had people who cut cotton down, who insured it out."

He guesses yields at the cooperative's two gins will average about a 1.4 bales per acre.

"That's nowhere close to break-even," he said. "Breakeven is about a bale and three quarters."

The situation wasn't any better down in Danevang.

"We had our smallest crop in probably 20 years," said Bob Wilkins, general manager at the Danevang Farmer's Coop Society. "We had less than a bale per acre average. The quality was bad, the grades were below average."

He had only one halfway positive thing to say about the county's poor cotton crop.

"Wharton County fared better than Jackson and Matagorda counties, as far as the yield goes," he noted.

"It's not such a good year," said Lonnie Beseda, Farmers Co-op East Bernard general manager. "Overall, the crop is half a crop, is what I'd call it. It's not there. The rain just lasted too long, it just deteriorated the cotton."

He said although some fields look like they should have made a good crop, that isn't the case.

"In the field, it looks like a lot of cotton, but so much on the bottom just rotted, so it made it a lot less," Beseda said. "Where it should have been two-and-ahalf bales (per acre), it's a bale or a bale and a quarter. The weights are off, the quality is off, and the seed is light and not grading good."