ALTUS – The cotton crop in southwest Oklahoma is a “mixed bag.”
“It depends on where you are,” said Gary Strickland, director of the Jackson County OSU Extension Center.
A Lawtonian driving through eastern Tillman County two weeks ago snapped photos of a healthy stand of cotton. But this year’s cotton crop in the 48,000-acre Lugert-Altus Irrigation District is “a disaster,” General Manager Tom Buchanan said last week. Production will be “negligible.”
“Farther south and east, you get a decent cotton crop because of the rain they received,” Strickland said.
Producers with wells can anticipate “average yields at best,” he said. There will be average yields of a bale to a bale and a half in irrigated fields, but dryland fields might get one-half to three-quarters of a bale per acre, Strickland said.
And farther west, toward Jackson and Harmon counties, is worse. Because of scorching temperatures and drought, crops have “burned up,” he said. Yields farther west will be “dismal,” Strickland predicted. “And the farther west you go, the worse it gets.”
Even so, there have been “pockets” of dryland acres where some rainfall has produced yields that are “not great, but better than nothing,” he said.
A U.S. Drought Monitor map released on Sept. 22 showed that the entire state ranged from “abnormally dry” to “exceptional drought” in Jackson, Harmon and Greer counties, plus several others in east-central and northeastern Oklahoma.