Mid-South Cotton

Laykyn Rainbolt, Contributing Editor

Katie Humphreys, Editor

Ernst Undesser, Editor

Ag Fax

Richard Griffing, Griffing Consulting, LLC, Monterey, Louisiana:

“This year has been awful – the worst start I’ve seen. We are wet, wet, wet, and we’re not even through planting, which is way behind for us. We’re probably 90% planted now. Half of those acres have been planted in the last 10 days (from June 8), and a lot of those will have to be replanted because of all this rain. We lost a lot of rice acres because we couldn’t get it planted, and cotton acres are down, too. We’re going to have a lot of late soybeans.  

“Cotton ranges from cotyledon to pinhead square. Most of it is just at first true leaf to cotyledon stage. A lot of people who couldn’t get cotton planted just went with prevented planting this year. 

“Soybeans range from not even planted to R3. This time last year, they were all at R3 or R4, so we’re very late this year. I’m afraid we’re going to see a lot of corn earworms in the soybeans with such a late crop. We’re starting to put up traps to monitor the moths.  

“The corn is doing fairly well. It’s all tasseled and at pollination now (June 8). We think we’ve lost some nitrogen, and we’ve had to apply a lot of urea to keep it going. It looks OK now despite losing heat units during the cooler, cloudy weather. 

“Since April 7, we’ve had 30 inches of rain (as of June 8). At this point, we’re probably 12 inches over our average rainfall from April 1 to now. Some periods we get heavy rains, but within the last week, it’s rained every day. It just keeps the fields sloppy wet. The rain chance for today is lower, and we’ve seen sunshine so far today (June 8). A few days like this and we can get back in the field. 

“One of our main issues is we had to apply burndown twice. Once in January or February and then a second time around a month ago due to short planting windows. After only a couple days of planting, it would rain, and the same thing would happen the next week. We got behind on pre-emerge chemicals, so we had a lot of weed control messes to clean up in cotton, soybeans and rice. Corn was in good shape.  

“We have a lot of milo this year, and most of it is late too, which is not good because of insect issues. It ranges from just coming out of the ground to boot stage. I found my first sugarcane aphids in milo this morning (June 8). Populations haven’t been bad so far, but they’re going to come on quick.”