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Management Strategies for Dryland Cotton Production in West Texas

Wes Ralston, Dan Krieg, and Thomas Gerik

ABSTRACT

Over 1.8 million acres of dryland cotton production exist annually on the Southern High Plains of Texas. As irrigation water supplies continue to dwindle and Conservation Reserve acreage is brought back into production, dryland cotton acreage will grow to well over 3 million acres. Dryland cotton yields across this area exhibit large year-to-year variation, but the trend line is flat over the last 30 years. Analyses of the rainfall pattern reveals that 70% of the annual precipitation occurs from mid-April through mid-October, the cotton growing season, which should fit dryland cotton production well. Further analysis of the weather patterns reveals that over 70% of the rainfall events are less than 0.5 inch per event. Low volume rains coupled with the high evaporative demand (over 0.30 inches per day) during the growing season results in over 50% of the rainfall being wasted to bare soil evaporation in the current skip-row pattern. Our hypothesis is that planting solid cotton in rotation with grain sorghum will provide the Texas High Plains dryland cotton producer with numerous advantages when compared to the current skip-row system, such as equivalent yields/reduced costs, conservation compliance, and agronomic/economic diversity. Within the solid cotton/sorghum rotation, there are numerous opportunities to enhance utilization efficiency of the rainfall for cotton production with individual management strategies. The overall objective is to combine the "Best Management Strategies" into a production system that maximizes yield and efficiency through better utilization of the total water resource. This paper summarizes eight years of testing our hypothesis.





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Document last modified April 16, 2003