Rains create hindrance in cotton harvest

Wilder says they have harvested seventy-five of the nine-hundred acres of cotton they planted. “Typically we’re through by now, preparing seed beds for next year, planting wheat, doing other things, but here we are almost November first and just really getting geared up to hopefully get started picking.”

And if you’re wondering why Wilder wasn’t picking while is wasn’t raining this week, he says, “We don’t want to go in and rut the fields up, and we’re naturally going into the winter time so field work is going to become a premium time wise. So we try not to create any more of a mess than we think that we can clean up. I don’t think we’ll have enough time if we get the rains we typically would to get the fields back in shape for planting.”

And how does what happened this year compare to last year’s hurricane, he answers, “When we had Harvey and we had about twenty-eight inches of rain in a two or three day period, that was much more manageable. It came and it went. And then you were able to get started relatively in the same normal time frame. This year it’s just been rain after rain after rain. I think we had sixteen, eighteen days of rain, of measurable amounts in October.”

October of 2018 will go down as one of the top ten wettest Octobers since records have kept. That’s turned out to be a very bad thing for area cotton farmers. Jay Wilder grows cotton in Burleson County. He says, “We’ve had cotton ready to harvest now for seven or eight weeks. We defoliated some starting early September time frame. Usually it’s like a ten day, two week process to get it from the first defoliation to harvest. During the defoliation process you’re just trying to remove all of the leaves from the plant and to get the bolls that have not opened to go ahead and open.”