By Beck Barnes
On first glance, it would be very easy to overlook Kansas’s planted cotton totals in the annual USDA acreage reports.
In 2015, producers there planted only 16,000 acres of cotton. That number represented the smallest total of any of the 17 states which make up the Cotton Belt. New Mexico, the next closest state in terms of cotton acreage, planted over twice that amount.
That’s why it’s so jarring to hear members of Kansas’s tiny community of cotton professionals make bold predictions about the coming years.
“We’re looking into development of what we need to go from 50,000 bales a year to a million bales a year in Kansas,” said Tom Lahey, a producer from Moscow, KS. “We want to get up to be near the third or fourth largest cotton producing state of all the cotton producing states.”
Lahey made that ambitious statement while en route to a meeting with the office of the state’s Secretary of Agriculture, Dr. Jackie McClaskey. The topic that day? Discussing ways the state government can assist Kansas producers in their efforts to switch out of traditional crops like wheat and corn and into cotton.
According to Lahey, the Plains Cotton Cooperative Association has been instrumental in helping him and his fellow Kansas cotton producers get the ball rolling. Producers in the state have been warming to cotton production for almost two decades. Due to a confluence of agronomic reasons, the Department of Agriculture has been eager to explore the possibilities with cotton in recent years. Now, thanks to a technological advancement from Dow AgroSciences, cotton’s moment may have finally arrived in Kansas.
Years in the Making
Lahey says he first planted small test plots of cotton back in 1998-99, and harvested his first crop – 40 acres worth – in 2000. From there, he’s increased acreage incrementally along the way, discovering the crop was economically sustainable.
“We’ve had it every year since,” Lahey says. “We’ve had some awfully good years. But in 2013 and 2014, we experienced a very bad drought.”
It’s in discussing his state’s water woes that Lahey sounds like a proper Southwest cotton producer. Located in the southwest corner of the state, his operation is in many ways similar to those of growers in much of Oklahoma and Texas.
He even draws his water from the Ogallala Aquifer, which West Texas cotton producers know has been shrinking in recent years. Just as it did in the Texas panhandle and in Oklahoma, the dwindling water supply has caused growers to seek less water-intensive crops – with full support in that endeavor from their state governments. Cotton has increased acreage in these regions as a result.
For his part, Lahey has been well-positioned to ride the wave of expanding cotton acreage.
“My son and I, we would like to be planting 4,500 to 5,500 acres each year,” Lahey says. “We have about 2,000 of that in dryland. The drought since 2011 has slowed our dryland planting, but if we get normal rainfall, we can yield really well on both dryland and irrigated.”
But like other cotton producers in Kansas, Lahey struggles with a different limiting factor that is fairly unique to the state. Because growers in his corner of Kansas have fallow wheat fields, 2,4-D drift has been a major concern.
“People who have tried cotton or would like to try cotton have been damaged with the 2,4-D to the point where they’re frustrated, and they say ‘Well I can’t afford that damage,’” says Lahey. “2,4-D in our dry climate, where drift can occur for two miles or more – it’s coming from farther away.”
Part of the problem in Kansas is timing. Because of the inherently short growing season, a cotton crop doesn’t have the extra time needed to recover from 2,4-D drift, which has been known to cause a delay in cotton maturity.
“So in 2013 and 2014, we had really nice crops, but it just got covered up with 2,4-D drift. We should’ve been looking at 1,500 pound averages, but we wound up with closer to 750 pounds an acre. We expected to make a good crop, but the drift from the fallow wheat areas got us.”
But, as fate would have it, the development of the Enlist Weed Control System by Dow AgroSciences is poised to shield Kansas cotton producers from yield-robbing drift at a time when growers in the state are increasingly turning to cotton. In addition, the Dow 2,4-D herbicide product, Enlist Duo, features Colex-D technology which promises to reduce drift and keep applications on target.
“We’re almost there,” Lahey says. “We think PhytoGen is going to fix our problem.”
Enlisting Help
As you might imagine, Dow AgroSciences representatives are well aware of the situation in Kansas.
“From a more immediate standpoint, those folks in Kansas are interested in drift protection,” says Ken Legé, PhytoGen cotton development specialist. “But in terms of weed control, the Enlist system will bring a lot to the table. Those farmers are already accustomed to spraying 2,4-D, so they’re already aware of what it can do for them, which is a lot. Incorporating that knowledge into cotton should be a natural fit for those guys.”
Dow is still awaiting federal approval to be able to spray Enlist Duo over the top in cotton. For the time being, the company can only offer drift protection through the 2,4-D tolerant Enlist technology. Kansas farmers, it seems, are highly interested.
“The demand for Enlist cotton in that area has been tremendous,” says Legé. “I only wish we would have had enough Enlist variety seed to supply them fully this year. But we all know how seed production is a process.”
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