By Julie Tomascik
Associate Editor
Mother Nature wreaked havoc on the cotton crop in several West Texas counties over the weekend. Hard rains, high winds and pelting hail were common across the region.
It’s left farmers in a difficult situation.
“Gaines, Terry and Dawson counties got hammered. And so did Martin and Howard [counties],” cotton farmer and Texas Farm Bureau (TFB) state director Val Stephens told the TFB Radio Network.
The five-county area received anywhere from 4 to 6 inches of rain.
“The first storm came through about 8:30, 9 o’clock,” Stephens said. “Two inches and some hail—nothing we couldn’t live with.”
But after midnight rolled around, the weather worsened.
“We got all types of weather from high winds to lightning, some more hail and probably 3 to 3.5 more inches of fast running water,” he said.
The cotton crop was decimated in much of the area. Stephens estimates that 45,000 acres were affected.
The West Texas growers are facing a tough decision.
“On our dryland operations, we’ve tried grain sorghum, hay grazer, sunflowers. It just doesn’t make for a cash crop,” Stephens said. “I would suspect that a lot of this acreage that gets hailed out could possibly get put back into wildcat cotton.”
That means those growers are rolling the dice and taking a gamble with replanting cotton, because that crop wouldn’t be insurable.