Beltwide Overview

Except for a couple of brief items I’ll file later, this about wraps up my Beltwide Cotton Conference coverage for 2006. For the record, this year’s Beltwide ran January 4-6 in San Antonio, Texas.

One thing I always try to do is pinpoint the important trends, both for my own benefit and for the sake of my readers. Here’s a quick overview:

• Precision ag and related technology continue to expand and gain credibility. Kenneth Hood, a Mississippi farmer and president of InTime, spoke during the first day’s general session and cited a number of cases of improved yields and cost savings related to the technology. It's an established technology now. Carl Hobbs, a Georgia consultant who spoke on the same program, made a couple of insightly points. First: "Technology is always more intimidating than it is hard." Second: "Put new technology in a farmer's hands for two or three years, and he'll figure out how to use it." A number of papers delivered later in the conference went further into the subject.
• Irrigation efficiency will continue to be a key topic. Below you’ll find a report on variable rate irrigation (VRI) work in Georgia, which sited a remarkable savings in water usage when VRI systems were installed on just a handful of pivots. The overall technology is getting better and cheaper, too. James Mahan, a USDA-ARS researcher based in Lubbock, Texas, noted that he’s seen a dramatic drop in the cost of infrared thermometers used to measure canopy temperatures. About 20 years ago the instruments cost $3,000. Today, the devices run as little as $20 and are “almost disposable.” That makes it more feasible for researchers to finetune irrigation recommendations and for farmers to monitor their own field conditions.
• Herbicide resistance. Some folks were still in denial about this topic a year ago. A symposium in 2005 at least brought the topic into focus, but none of the Extension workers or researchers on the panel last year were overtly willing to say that wide-area resistance plans needed to be put into place or widely recommended. (I know because I asked in ’05, and have the dubious distinction of being the only person to actual pose a question during that symposium.) This year, herbicide resistance rated a spot near the top of the opening day’s general session, which guaranteed a maximum audience. This year’s opening herbicide resistance presentation was made by NCSU weed scientist Alan York, and hopefully it put a scare in people. With the discovery of glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth in Georgia and suspected cases elsewhere, the topic will pretty much be with this generation of weed scientists for the rest of their careers. Every weed-control recommendation from here on out will be based, in part, on the effect on herbicide resistance. Those of us who covered the development of pyrethroid resistance in the 1980s certainly have a feeling of déjà vu.
• WTO, farm program debate. I’m not going to stray too deeply into this one, but suffice to say the eventual outcome on these interconnected topics will affect the American countryside. It’s a shame that the European Union only produces about 2% of the world’s cotton (mainly in Spain and Greece). The EU has been trying to make its cotton support programs “less distorting” in terms of trade, but that mainly means shifting from a support payment based on a target price/world price formula to a system with payments to farmers based on yields and quality and other variables. EU producers had enjoyed the highest payment structure in the developed world, upwards of $1.25 a pound, and much of their production is irrigated. France doesn’t grow cotton but is involved in cotton in terms of its former African colonies, which lack the kind of overall production efficiency, transportation systems and ginning infrastructure that it actually takes to compete in the world market. That’s a legacy of colonialism compounded by the murky politics and management of Third World governments.

Here are all of our Beltwide-related articles:

• Beltwide Overview (Current Item)
  
• Innovative Grower Panel, 2006
• FMC Introduces Carbine Insecticide
• Beltwide Shorts
• Saving Water, One Pivot At A Time
• Herbicide Resistance: Don't Panic, But Be Proactive
• O.A. Cleveland Expects Narrower Pricing And Continued Shifting Toward Exports
• The Implications Of An Export Market
• The Coming World Market
  

Next year: The 2007 Beltwide is scheduled for New Orleans, January 9-12. National Cotton Council officials said that are hopeful that the conference will go as planned.