LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - After two weeks of surveying farmers for its annual farm production forecasts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it expects Arkansas farmers to plant 500,000 acres of cotton, up from 375,000 last year.
Cotton consumption is up worldwide, but the increase comes because the prices for other commodities are poor, according to Bill Robertson, a cotton agronomist with the University of Arkansas System’s Agriculture Division. The division works with the USDA in gathering the estimates.
Cotton prices are about 75 cents a pound, up from 56 cents last year.
“The prices are better for cotton than anything else, but they’re still not good enough for a farmer to go out and buy more pickers,” Robertson told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (https://bit.ly/2p0DWX8r ).
Still, the USDA numbers were a bit of a surprise for Robertson. He anticipated 430,000 acres after talking to a few more consultants, farmers and members of the state Boll Weevil Eradication Board.
“I found a few farmers who planned to plant, maybe, 25 percent more, because even though they’d gotten out of cotton for a while, they still had their pickers,” Robertson said. “I also found a lot of farmers in southwest Arkansas getting into cotton again after being out of it for a long time.”
He noted that “cotton acreage is filling in for corn, it’s replacing beans.”
The USDA’s Statistics Service projected 12.2 million acres of cotton planted nationwide, up 21 percent from last year. Arkansas’ anticipated cotton acreage is second to Texas, where farmers said they would plant another 1.2 million acres of the fiber, for a total of nearly 7 million acres.
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Information from: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, https://www.arkansasonline.com
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