By Clint Thompson
The lack of sufficient rainfall in recent months has put cotton growers in a precarious situation leading up to planting season. They need adequate moisture to provide cotton seed the boost it needs to produce a strong crop. But extreme drought conditions are widespread across South Georgia’s cotton-growing region, according to the March 12 release of the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The Georgia Cotton Commission and Camp Hand, University of Georgia Extension cotton agronomist, caution growers about the importance of water conservation, especially with regards to cover crops that are present in fields.
“If it doesn’t rain in the next couple of weeks, we need to be killing cover, too. That stuff will zap the moisture from the field,” Hand said. “I plant cover on everything, but on a dryland field, we’ve got a couple of dryland fields with cover and I’m starting to think we need to kill them as soon as possible just so it quits using up what little moisture we’ve got.”
Extreme conditions in Southwest Georgia start in Miller and Seminole counties; stretch to the Atlantic coast from Camden to Chatham counties; and as far north as Laurens, Johnson and Emanuel counties.
“We could get in a bad situation. We haven’t had a rain, really, since September. At the end of August, the first part of September, it hadn’t rained,” Hand said.
“We planted some cotton last week, planting early, and it lost moisture in about two to three days. We were scared it wasn’t going to come up. We may have a little moisture on some of our dryland stuff where we’re strip-tilling, but really we’re losing it in like two days. We have got to start getting rain.”