Oklahoma Cotton Crop In Trouble

Aug 27, 2014

Cotton farmers had high hopes going into the 2014 growing season. With ongoing drought the last time Oklahoma produced a great cotton crop was in 2010, since then the crop has struggled pretty much every year. Oklahoma State University Research Director and Cotton Extension Program Leader Randy Boman said 2010 was one for the record books, but that's the only bright spot in recent memory. The 2011 crop was an absolute disaster for the southern plains, the worst in many decades, then 2012 and 2013 have gradually improved.

Going into the 2014 growing season there was a lot of concern early on due to having one of the driest starts of the year from January til May, then Oklahoma got into a wetter than normal pattern in May. Boman said that allowed more farmers to planting cotton in the southeastern part of the state.

"We actually had a lot of cotton go in, according to USDA NASS we're sitting at probably 240 thousand acres or so, which is up quite a bit from last year at 185 thousand acres," Bowman said.

The crop got off to a great start initially, but that optimism for a good crop has changed.

"Unfortunately the last week or two we just absolutely run out of gas," Boman said. "The moisture stress has hit the crop, we really haven't had much precipitation, I don't believe any precipitation thus far in August and so with the high temperatures triple digits, our evapotranspiration the crop use of the water has been really high, so we're just kinda hitting the wall."

Right now the crop is holding on, but it will depend on mother nature to finish out. Boman said this crop needs to receive some rainfall in the week or two it's going to help out in a lot of places.

"If we don't do something in the next ten days to two weeks its not going to be very pretty, just because of the extremely high temperatures," he said.

It's not just the farmers who are depending on this crop. The ongoing drought has also impacted the state's cotton production and those industries that depend on having a crop to process.

"It hurts the guys that gin the cotton, it hurts the guys that move the cotton from the fields, they pick up the modules and take those modules to the gins and then that gets processed into the bales and everything gets separated, the lent, the seed and the trash," Boman said. "Of course we not hauling as much seed to the oil mill, so that's got ramifications there, we're not moving as many bales into the PCCA warehouses, so that has ramifications there, so a pretty significant economic hit.

And its not just cotton. In southwestern Oklahoma, Boman said there are several counties that have had failed wheat crops three of the last four years.

"It's really been kind of a tag-team effect on a lot of coops, because a lot of our coops handle grain as well as they have gins," Boman said. "So its been a really tough situation and that's really hard on the economic viability of our infrastructure."

Weather forecasters are predicting dryer than normal conditions to continue for several more years. Boman said that will be hard on all farmers and ag-related businesses.

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Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”