By Shelby Shank
Field Editor

Drought plagued the Lone Star State in 2022 with a record number of failed cotton acres and financial strain for cotton industry infrastructure, but commodity organizations are working with legislators on an emergency grant and long-term solutions for cotton farmers and ginners.

“Infrastructure was financially strained this last year from a lack of volume to a point that some operations didn’t even open their doors because they didn’t have the volume,” Kody Bessent, CEO of Plains Cotton Growers, Inc., said.

The 2011 drought was the worst drought recorded, but last year’s drought left some ginners to lose money.

In 2022, Texas Star Co-op Gin processed 34,000 bales of cotton, 150,000 bales less than the previous year. Further south, near Corpus Christi, an independent ginner noted 95% of his growers’ acres failed.

“I think 2022 was much worse on us from a gin manager’s standpoint than 2011,” Todd Straley, a cotton grower in Plainview and gin manager at Quarterway Cotton Growers, Inc. said. “A little less rainfall in ’22 than we had in ’21, but the main difference is our irrigation capacity today is about half of what it was in 2011.”

With fewer harvestable cotton acres, some gins maintained a smaller crew than usual.

“We’re trying to work on an ag disaster relief grant,” Bessent said. “A one-time grant, for infrastructure to tap into, to try to heal up some of the financial loss until a more permanent solution can be developed, a risk management tool, be it business interruption insurance or a more normalized based product.”

Plains Cotton Growers wrote a letter on behalf of the Texas cotton industry petitioning Chairwoman Joan Huffman, Senate Committee on Finance, and Chairman Greg Bonnen, House Committee on Appropriations, to support the Agricultural Disaster Relief Grant Budget Rider authored by Sen. Charles Perry (District 28) and Rep. Cecil Bell (District 3). The letter is signed by more than 150 cotton infrastructure and cotton support organizations.

The world’s largest cotton patch, the 25 contiguous counties around Lubbock, remains in drought, giving both farmers and ginners cause for concern about this year’s cotton crop.

But cotton ginners are holding faith that this year will be better.

“I think we’re going to have a lot of cotton planted this year,” Straley said in an interview with the Texas Farm Bureau Radio Network. “We’re looking forward to the rains that are coming this summer as we’re moving out of the La Niña phase and into El Niño. Looking forward to an above average rainfall for the first time in quite some time.”