Slump Over : King Cotton Back as Top Dixie Crop

Copeland Griswold wades joyfully into a field of cotton that spreads like a vast snowbank against the backdrop of oak and pine on his Florida Panhandle farm. Overhead, in a picture of perfect cotton-picking weather, the mid-morning sun burns hot and bright in an achingly blue sky.

“I love this plant,” says Griswold, 55, an unabashed smile playing on his tanned, weathered face. “I love to feel it, to play in it, to wallow in it and wonder what the poor folks are doing.”

Griswold hasn’t always felt so good about the fluffy white fiber. Back in the 1960s, he was among the ever-growing number of farmers in the “Old Plantation” South who got out of cotton farming and thought they never would return.

Plagued by boll weevils, bad weather, slumping demand and poor prices, they abandoned the long-time “king” of Dixie agriculture for soybeans, corn and wheat--crops traditionally associated with the Midwestern farm belt.

Couldn’t Make Money

“It just got so you couldn’t make any money off of cotton,” Griswold recalled.

Cotton, as a result, went into a long and pronounced slump from which it seemed it would never recover. In the 1960s and 1970s its acreage fell by almost one-half in the region, which stretches from Arkansas and Louisiana across Mississippi, Alabama, Northern Florida and Georgia, and into Tennessee, the Carolinas and Virginia. Cotton land dropped from 6.6 million acres to 3.4 million while land devoted to soybeans, corn and wheat climbed from 17 million acres to more than 28 million.

In recent years, however, cotton has had a dramatic reversal of fortune as a combination of factors has helped restore its potential for profit.

Growing Demand

Among these are:

--Growing demand for cotton products--especially among members of the “baby-boom” generation.

--The 1985 federal farm bill, which is credited with making U.S. cotton competitive in world markets and bolstering cotton prices while setting government subsidies to cotton farmers on a downward path.

--New agricultural technology, including computers that can simulate plant growth and tell a particular cotton farmer when to plant, fertilize, irrigate and harvest.

--Widespread boll weevil eradication campaigns. The weevil is a small grayish insect with a long beak whose larvae, when hatched in the immature bolls of cotton plants, destroys the boll. It has now been completely eliminated in Virginia and the Carolinas, and multimillion-dollar eradication programs were launched this year in Georgia, Florida and Alabama.

Cotton growing has also become increasingly attractive because of the mounting difficulties Southern farmers have faced in turning a profit on soybeans and grains. Because these crops grow better in the Midwest, the South is at a disadvantage when, as in recent years, supplies are high and prices are low.

California, Arizona and West Texas have long been important cotton-producing areas, but the resurgence of cotton planting is taking place mainly in the area where cotton first made its mark, the “Old Plantation” South.

Farmers here are returning to their agricultural roots in a big way, heavily investing in cotton farming equipment and planting cotton in fields that, in many cases, haven’t nurtured a cottonseed in decades.

Of course, no one expects cotton ever to return to the days when it dominated Southern agriculture to the virtual exclusion of every other crop--covering more than 17 million acres in white blossoms--and dictated the social and political as well as the economic life of Dixie.

But, as Earl Sears, executive vice president of the Memphis, Tenn.-based National Cotton Council said: “Cotton is on the offense as never before. There’s new life in the old crop.”

In the Carolinas, for example, total cotton acreage has soared by nearly 67% in the past four years, going to 215,000 acres this year.

In Georgia over the same period, cotton plantings jumped an even more dramatic 117% to 260,000, while the state’s soybean crop, estimated at 850,000 acres this year, is down 32% from 1986--its third straight year of sharp decline.

And here in Florida, where cotton farming was virtually extinct in 1979 when a mere 3,000 acres were planted, farmland in cotton production has since climbed to 25,000 acres--an increase of more than 800%.

Gets Back Into Game

Among the expanding Florida cotton lands are the 1,250 acres farmed by Griswold in Santa Rosa County, the heart of Florida’s cotton belt, north of Pensacola. Griswold got back into the game three years ago, investing more than $500,000 in two giant mechanical cotton pickers, two spray rigs, two tractors and 20 screened trailers to haul picked cotton from the fields to the gin.

His first cotton crop covered only a modest 200 acres, but the yields, he says, were big enough to “set you afire” and the cotton fetched an average of $600 an acre. That was incentive enough for him to expand his cotton acreage until it now makes up half of the 2,500 acres he farms in partnership with his two sons.

And next year, he vows, “We’re going to plant cotton wall to wall.”

This season promises to be especially good for cotton’s comeback. Cotton prices are higher than they’ve been in years, yields are expected to be up by as much as 30% in some states and the export market is booming.

“This year’s going to be a big one for us,” said Kenneth Hood, 46, a Mississippi Delta planter who, with his three brothers, farms 4,000 acres of cotton and runs a ginning operation in the Bolivar County community of Perthshire.

“In terms of the volume at the gin, it will probably be the highest year ever, and in terms of the average yield for our total acreage, it will be one of the highest in a number of years.”

Harvesting of Mississippi’s cotton crop is already more than half completed, and outside the Hood brothers’ ginning plant, cotton trailers are lined up three and four deep, waiting their turn to unload. Inside, the towering ceiling-to-floor gins spin round-the-clock, separating the seed from the fiber or “lint,” as cotton farmers refer to it, in preparation for baling and shipping.

Of all the factors propelling cotton’s renaissance, perhaps none brings more delight to the cotton industry than the expanding demand for cotton apparel and home furnishings. In the first six months of this year, cotton’s share of that market advanced to 47%, at the expense of such fabrics as polyester, wool and acrylic.

That is a gain of four percentage points over the same six-month period last year--a hefty hike that represents a $120-million increase in income for U.S. cotton growers--and an advance of 13 percentage points since 1975, when cotton’s market share of clothing and home furnishings hit an all-time low of 34%.

Cotton industry spokesmen attribute much of the growing consumer demand to the research and promotion efforts by Cotton Inc., a New York-based marketing firm whose $18-million annual budget is paid out of assessments on cotton growers.

In the early 1970s, Cotton Inc. developed the familiar stylized cotton logo, or trademark, that now is recognized by an estimated 70% of the adult population in the United States. This year’s television advertising campaign, which features the slogan “Take Comfort in Cotton,” has been viewed by tens of millions of households since the first commercials aired during the Cotton Bowl on New Year’s Day.

“The baby-boom generation is certainly receptive to what we’re advertising and makes up an important piece of the market,” said Phil Burnett, president of the Cotton Board, which oversees Cotton Inc.’s activities. “But we’re also seeing more and more cotton products in the Searses, the Penneys, the K-Marts and the Wal-Marts--places where ‘yuppies’ are not necessarily a big factor in sales.”

The two-year-old federal farm bill also aided the revitalization of “King Cotton.” Through a radical and complicated “marketing loan” concept, it guarantees, in effect, that U.S. cotton will remain competitive in global markets, no matter how low prices drop.

In 1986, the first year the bill was in effect, market prices for cotton dipped to an average of about 54 cents a pound, the lowest price since 1975. The federal government gave growers about $1.7 billion in subsidies to make up the difference between the market price and a target price of 81 cents per pound.

However, last year’s low prices helped clear out excessive inventories of U.S. cotton, setting the stage for a rise in cotton prices since January of this year to around 70 cents a pound from about 57 cents a pound.

As a result of these increased prices, this year’s federal outlays to cotton farmers probably will be more than $1 billion less than last year’s and next year’s payments could shrink to a total of $200 million, according to Dean Etheridge, chief economist for the National Cotton Council.

“We anticipated the kind of scenario that we’ve seen when we were pressing Congress for the new farm bill,” he said. “What we didn’t anticipate was how quickly markets would respond after the measure went into effect.”

Cotton farmers also are getting a boost from new computer technology.

Frank Mitchener, who farms several thousand acres of cotton around the Mississippi Delta community of Sumner, pioneered the use of the so-called Gossym Comax plant growth simulator system--and quickly learned the value of it.

“It was in 1984, and we had a magnificent crop, a crop like I had never seen before,” he said. “Just before I was beginning to leave on a trip to England and Germany, Gossym Comax told me that I should start defoliating the plants--the first stage in preparing cotton for harvest.

“But I didn’t believe it. I thought it was still much too early then. So I went over to Europe, spent two weeks and had a wonderful time with my wife. When I returned, we defoliated and then started picking. We had been picking for about 10 days when it began to rain. And it rained and rained--for 24 straight days.”

Lost a Bundle

Mitchener lost a bundle on that crop as a result, but since then he says: “I’m a believer in Gossym Comax. If I had done what it told me, I would have picked that cotton before the rains came.”

How long cotton will continue on its recent roll remains a big question.

Despite the factors that have helped place cotton farming on a more secure and profitable basis, “We have not abrogated the law that says there is a textile cycle, and sooner or later, we’re going to be on the down side,” said Rudi Scheidt, president of Hohenburg Bros., one of the world’s largest cotton brokerage firms.

However, he added: “We’ll have a much better foundation to build upon once the cycle goes back up than we’ve had in a long time.”

To Griswold, the Florida Panhandle cotton farmer, no matter what the future brings, it looks better than the one he faced growing corn and wheat.

“It was never intended for the South to be competitive in grains,” he said. “The Good Lord allocated grain and he allocated cotton--and he allocated cotton to the South.”