By Clint Thompson
The Georgia Cotton Commission’s first mid-year meeting on Wednesday in Statesboro, Georgia, educated and celebrated with those in attendance.
The event at the Nessmith-Lane Conference Center at Georgia Southern University provided growers timely information as they continue to navigate the current growing season. It also celebrated the winners of the Georgia Cotton Quality Awards, which was a significant reason the meeting was started to begin with, says Taylor Sills, executive director of the Georgia Cotton Commission.
“We wanted to open that up to more and more gins and more and more producers and wait until people were done ginning their cotton. We pushed the deadline back and gave folks at UGA (University of Georgia) more time to collect that data and then partner with Southeastern Cotton Ginners to do their Georgia preseason meeting here in Statesboro as well. It just naturally worked out,” Sills said.
“We had a great turnout for our first mid-year meeting here in Statesboro and East Georgia; we had a number that we would be pleased with, and we far exceeded that. We promoted it a lot, but it’s really our local Extension people here on the ground; we work so closely with Extension and just appreciate all that they do for us in so many ways.”
What Was Discussed?
Members of the UGA Cotton Team, including agronomist Camp Hand, economist Yangxuan Liu and entomologist Phillip Roberts provided updates for growers as they face the final weeks of this year’s production season.
Other timely topics including the Farm Bill, cotton marketing, Cotton Trust Protocol and prevention of plastic contamination of cotton were also discussed.
“Part of the reason we did this, all of the producers hear from the Extension specialists at the beginning of the year about given ideal situations what can you do. We decided to come here, and given what’s happened to date, what do we need to do? We’ve been in a really unique situation with our cotton crop this year. Most every producer in the state will tell you their crop is at least 10 days behind,” Sills said. “We’ve got producers that came from southwest Georgia over here for this. It’s not just beneficial to the producers in this community but for producers statewide.”