Sturgeon Farmland News

June, 1997 THE LATEST SCOOP ON YOUR FARMLAND Volume 9, Number 2

Strange Cotton Planting

Our tenant used a very strange method for planting his cotton this spring. Due to the extremely rough field conditions at the time he listed his fields, his furrows had many clods. At that time, in early March, he had every expectation that the spring would bring some rain to moisten and soften those clods. Unfortunately, this spring was the driest in living memory. As a result, at planting time in mid-April, the fields were both dry and full of clods.

To make certain he planted the cotton seeds well into the necessary soil moisture, our tenant planted the seeds very deep. This, in turn, meant that the subsequent "de-capping" operation left the young cotton plants in deep furrows instead of on more or less flat seed beds. This can be seen in the first photograph.

Young cotton plants in "furrows."

After the cotton was cultivated twice, the fields looked almost normal, with irrigation furrows between the cotton rows, as shown in the second photograph.

Cotton plants and "almost normal" irrigation furrows.

As this is being written, on June 19th, our tenant is just finishing up his first irrigation of the growing season.

Robert Sturgeon
Publisher, Editor, Reporter, Ace Photographer, Newsroom Flunky, Webmaster
rsturge@inreach.com
http://www.vistech.net/users/rsturge