cotton

The rising price of man-made fibers will make cotton more attractive to the apparel industry and boost global cotton consumption by 3 percent this market year, said the International Cotton Advisory Committee.

The House passed an $81-billion disaster relief bill that includes $3.8 billion for farmers and ranchers, with Florida expected to get a large share of that money, said The Hill newspaper.

Two of the major fibers available to clothing manufacturers are cotton and polyester. Cotton is becoming more price-competitive against petroleum-based polyester, which should boost global demand for the field-grown fiber, but it won't stop a build-up of cotton supplies, says the International Cotton Advisory Committee.

Faced by hundreds of complaints of crops damaged by dicamba, the Arkansas Plant Board proposed a ban on use of the weedkiller on soybeans and cotton for most of the 2018 growing season.

A simulation by Texas A&M scientists indicates that winter wheat is a feasible cover crop for cotton growers in the arid Plains, says one of the researchers.

Monsanto is fighting back as agricultural scientists accuse the company of misleading farmers about the safety of its weedkiller dicamba. The chemical has been blamed for millions of dollars in crop damage this year.

The one-two punch of Hurricane Harvey on Gulf coast and Hurricane Irma in the Southeast reduced the U.S. cotton crop by more than 600,000 bales, or 3 percent, said the USDA in its monthly crop report. The USDA lowered its estimate of the harvest in Texas, the No. 1 cotton state, and in No. 2 Georgia, down by 300,000 bales apiece.

Three federal workers were injured in the collision of a semi-truck and another vehicle in a motorcade carrying Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue on a tour of hurricane damage on the Texas Gulf Coast, said the Texas Tribune. Perdue, who was in another vehicle with Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and U.S. House Agriculture Committee chairman Michael Conaway, was not injured.

The Senate proposal to create a subsidy program for cottonseed could carry a pricetag of $420 million or more, according to an analysis by economist Carl Zulauf of Ohio State University. Zulauf did not calculate the figure but estimated 14.08 million acres might be eligible, with payments of $30 an acre, based on USDA payment formulas.

Cotton growers are headed for the largest cotton harvest in 12 years, said USDA's monthly crop report, although officials acknowledged they don't have a full picture of damage from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which struck much of the Cotton Belt. The USDA said it would conduct special surveys in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina to assess how much of the cotton, rice, peanut and soybean crops were harvested.

For Texas cotton farmers, 2017 was shaping up to be the best harvest in more than a decade, according to NBC News. But then Hurricane Harvey hit and turned their prospects upside down. The turn of events was painful, given that in 2016 “farmers were lucky to harvest one bale of cotton per acre of the profitable crop.” This year, they had been expecting yields of three or four bales per acre.

Monsanto chief technology officer Robb Fraley says there will be enough dicamba-tolerant seed available to account for half of U.S. soybean plantings next year. At the same time that EPA reportedly is considering new guidelines on use of the weedkiller, Fraley described dicamba as a "tremendous success" for "the overwhelming majority of farmers using" the low-volatility formulation of the herbicide.

Based on conditions at the start of August, the USDA forecast the largest U.S. cotton crop in 11 years, 20.6 million bales, but the estimate "is far from a certainty" after Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, the largest cotton-growing state, says an American Farm Bureau Federation analysis. "Severe flooding related to Hurricane Harvey is likely to have impacted major cotton producing regions."

With winds of 105 mph early today, Hurricane Harvey could be the most powerful storm to hit the United States since 2005, bringing 15 to 25 inches of rain to the Texas coast and up to 15 inches of rain to central Louisiana, said the National Weather Service, as growers scurried to harvest cotton and rice ahead of the storm.

A University of Missouri weed specialist says the weedkiller dicamba has damaged more than 2.5 million acres of cropland this year, mostly in the Midwest and South, reports Harvest Public Media. The researcher, Kevin Bradley, says, “I don’t know that we’ve ever in our agricultural history seen one active ingredient do so much damage across one nation like that.”

The insurance-like cotton subsidy program of the 2014 farm law is a failure, U.S. lawmakers, lenders and cotton groups said in four coordinated letters to President Trump. They asked him to keep in operation the cotton ginning cost-share program created as a one-time, $300 million payment last year. In a show of support, letters were sent by 109 representatives, 26 senators, 82 cotton groups and 1,600 lenders and rural businesses.