Georgia Cotton Farmer Reaps Drought-Shrunken Crop : Agriculture: In April, it seemed the start of a season of promise. But now, as he works the books, the hope has withered to intense disappointment.

The sun had set but a little twilight remained, and Billy Griggs was still in his field.

He’d waited for this day, impatiently, just like every year. Finally, seeds were going in the red ground, ground his daddy once had worked. In the dim light, another Griggs--this time W.C. III--was making a cotton crop.

Before too long, stars were out in the black sky: It was 10 p.m., and Billy Griggs was home. “Got 20 acres planted,” he said. “That’s a good start.”

Back then, in April, it seemed the start of a season of promise. But now, as Griggs works late again, this time harvesting his drought-shrunken crop and working the books, the hope has withered to a disappointment that’s harder to express.

“I don’t remember that poem but it starts, ‘God, teach me to accept the things I can’t change . . . ,’ ” he said recently. “It’s hard to keep that sick feeling down in the pit of your stomach.”

The sickening certainty of a bad year came on slowly, through the seasons.

Spring

Light rain is falling on the Griggs place. The man speaking on the phone, lining things up for the coming season, wears a Griggs Farms cap over short, steel-colored hair and a patch on his work shirt that says “Billy.” His cigarette lighter snaps as he lights up.

In the kitchen, decorated with framed sayings and a collection of old tins, with a computer tucked in a corner, a window looks out on a tire swing hanging over a field of vivid green grass and, beyond, the waiting red soil.

Billy Griggs began preparing the land as soon as the weather allowed. He was eager to plant again, something he’s done every spring since 1969.

“Far back as I can remember, all I can ever wanted to do was farm--back when I was a boy,” says Griggs, who has just turned 47.

His father, W.C. Jr., runs the family cotton warehouse, where a sister, Gloria, works. A brother, George, runs the gin. Billy runs the farm, helped by his teen-age son and namesake.

It works fine. “If the ox gets in the ditch, we’ll get together and get him out,” Griggs says.

The cotton farmer has been doing some figuring about what level of production it will take to break even on the crop this year: 600 pounds, more than a bale, per acre.

He talks about fluctuating market prices, about so-called deficiency payments and other government farm programs that he sketches on an envelope. He talks about land values, and about the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he doesn’t like.

He talks about other things he’s raised and stopped raising: corn, hogs, cattle. The latter “love to get out on a Saturday night. That cotton ain’t gonna get out. Anyway, I grew up with cotton.”

In a few days, the skies clear. The red land dries enough to support the big tractors. The purple seed goes into the ground.

The rains never really return.

In May, Griggs is doing some irrigating when he gets a kind of omen of the season ahead: an $11 microswitch on one part of a huge, interconnected irrigating apparatus sticks, staying closed when it should open.

It costs nearly $8,000 to repair, Griggs says, recalling the sight of the disabled machine: “It looks like a dead goose out there with a broken neck. It’s just pitiful.”

Summer

“It’s dry, very dry,” Griggs says one June day. “Surprisingly, though, the crop seems to be holding up pretty well.” He lays down chemicals to kill insects and their eggs.

Ten days later, he sounds less encouraged. The young crop is starting to bloom, but that might reflect drought stress, as the plant tries to rush the fertilization cycle. “That means trouble,” he says.

About two weeks later: Griggs may give his hired men some time off. “We’ve been going pretty hard,” he says, doing everything from fixing a bulldozer part to applying soil nutrients. Besides, there’s been a little rain. “We had six-tenths of an inch yesterday, and three-tenths the day before.”

A week or so into July, the crop has a bushy look, with ivy-like, light green leaves and tiny buds, the beginnings of what will develop into bolls, containing the valuable fiber.

Spreading leaves to show off the buds, Griggs compares the needs of the crop to the needs of children. He has three grown daughters and 16-year-old William Clegg Griggs IV.

Young Clegg’s sisters and many cousins now have moved away, and he’s not sure what he’ll do in the long term. He says he’d like to rear his own family on some of this land. He, too, has made investments here; he tells of how, for instance, he came to quit football.

“I was late for the first practice, and the coach told me I had to make a choice. I told him there wasn’t any choice,” Clegg says. Why was he late? “I was refilling a sprayer. It wasn’t any big thing, but I had to get it done.”

A family’s efforts need help from nature, and this year little help comes.

It’s August now, and hot even for central Georgia. A heat wave compounds the drought. Across the Cotton Belt, farmers like Billy Griggs have 13 million acres planted. It’s a good year in Texas and some other places. But here, the scanty rains have been a tease.

Farmers like Griggs stay up all night, napping in chairs or in trucks in the field, with two alarm clocks to wake them, to check the irrigators every hour or two.

“It takes a crazy fellow to stay in farming,” Griggs says. He tries to smile. “You think about all kinds of things in the wee hours of the morning, just you and the mosquitoes.”

A little more than half of Griggs’ 900-acre crop is irrigated. “I don’t even go to my dry-land fields anymore,” he says. “To be perfectly honest with you, it’s pretty depressing. A bad crop just gets worse.”

His weary voice adds: “I’m gonna take the weekend if we lose it all.”

Autumn

The harvest is finally under way.

Fields that had been flat expanses of dust back in April now are speckled white with cotton bolls that Griggs is picking the same way he planted: with giant machines, using specialized attachments.

On the irrigated cropland, yields may come close to last year’s, 750 pounds an acre or more. But the 45% of his land that stayed dry is yielding about one-third that much.

After a long season of work, Griggs says he doesn’t know whether he’ll break even. “What it boils down to is, if you can provide for your family, if you can keep that, you’ve done your work in this world. . . .

“Then, along about December or January, when you get through some of the problems,” he says, “then you begin to look to the next year. February and March come, and the blood starts pumping and you want to get started again.

“Ever since I was little, farming, that’s all I’ve wanted to do.”