Will There Be Enough Trucks?

As I left the bluffs at Vicksburg, that same old feeling crept over me. It’s funny how it happens. You may leave that flat Delta land and live somewhere else, but a part of you remains there forever – especially if you were involved with agriculture. And, more particularly, if you had anything to do with cotton. And, quite naturally, I started looking for a field of cotton. True it was a little early, but…

By the time I got to Rolling Fork I was in a panic. Where was the cotton?

All I had seen was corn or soybeans. There were a few unplanted fields that might go to cotton, but not many. I had seen planting intentions that talked about a 40% reduction in Mississippi cotton acres. The trouble is, I don’t know when they started the calculations. The numbers that I understand better say that in 2006 there were about 1.2 million acres of cotton in Mississippi. For 2009 the predictions are for a little over 350,000 acres. And for that size crop, there may only be about 70 gins running. Similar data are said to apply in other cotton areas.

Cotton producers and researchers began to look into ways to get the crop to the spinner more efficiently. Through a process of evolution, we now have boll buggies, module builders and module haulers that allow the pickers to roll on. And now we have new pickers with attached module builders. And high density presses shrink the bale size to get more bales on a truck. This is a story of efficiency.

I can understand all that. But it is not the question I pose.

The new combines are bigger and faster. The diesel truck and grain trailer look the same as they did years ago, just faster. Faster to get to the elevator quicker to painfully wait in the line.

Now the question: where will we get all the trucks needed to get this huge grain crop to the elevator.

If somebody can figure out how to engineer a quick way to turn a boll buggy into a grain hauler they’ll briefly be a hero.

- Tom Crumby