Cotton Makes a Comeback : Imperial Valley Farmers React to Prices at Levels Not Seen Since Civil War

After taking a $100,000 loss on his cotton crop four years ago, Imperial Valley farmer Mike Cox surrendered to the tiny pests that bedeviled him. He switched to farming low-risk alfalfa, wheat and sugar beets instead.

Cox wasn’t alone. Imperial Valley farmers planted a measly 6,300 acres of cotton in 1992, down from 143,000 acres of the white fluffy stuff as recently as 1977, when the valley was still a veritable land of cotton.

Valley farmers were tired of fighting losing battles against the pink bollworm and the white fly at a time of weak cotton prices, and the region’s cotton fields were all but written off.

“You feel humble trying to outsmart something that doesn’t have much of a brain,” said Cox, 44, watching a quarter-inch pink bollworm slither across a leaf of an infested cotton plant.

Yet today, cotton is making a slow but solid comeback in this steaming, desert-rimmed valley, thanks to dramatically different growing techniques and a shortened season that have successfully controlled--if not eradicated--pest damage.

Cotton acreage reached 9,200 acres this year in the Imperial Valley and should hit at least 15,000 acres in 1996, University of California Agricultural Extension adviser Anne F. Wrona said last week.

Cox is among the farmers giving cotton another shot. And his decision to plant on 400 acres of his 1,200-acre spread this year was propitious: Cotton prices have soared as high as $1.17 per pound this year, the highest since the Civil War, before settling at 80-cent levels that are a good 20% to 30% higher than the yearly averages of the last decade.

“I can make money growing cotton at these prices,” Cox said, showing the understatement typical of farmers wary of broadcasting a successful year.

What’s driving the price up for Cox’s cotton is poor crops elsewhere in the United States and the world. A succession of pests and bad weather have created a worldwide shortage: The tobacco budworm has pummeled half a million acres of cotton in Mississippi, an unending drought plagues the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, and a host of bug and weather problems confront cotton growers in India, China and Pakistan.

Also adding pressure to cotton prices is growing demand. Cotton is an increasingly popular fabric worldwide. Over the last nine years, U.S. consumption has increased an average 7% annually, according to Calcot Ltd., the Bakersfield-based cotton marketing cooperative for 3,000 farmers in California and Arizona.

“Consumption has been going up marginally every year on a steady basis,” said Walter Spilka, cotton analyst at Smith Barney in New York. “Everybody’s wearing blue jeans.”

Cotton prices averaged about 73 cents per pound last year and just 58 cents during the 1993 harvest year, said Robert A. Skinner, agricultural economist with the Department of Agriculture in Washington.

All this has put growers across California, so far spared bad weather and infestations, in the catbird seat. Seventy percent of the crop in California--the nation’s No. 2 producer after Texas--is exported. The state’s high-quality cotton is especially prized in the Far East.

But Cox and his neighbors would be in no position to take advantage of the improved market if it weren’t for the techniques developed by UC scientists to fight the pink bollworm and the white fly. The techniques center on a shorter growing season that disrupts the life cycle of the airborne pests.

Under the new regimen, heavier and more precise irrigation and use of chemicals has shortened the growing season to five months from nine. And after the early harvest, the plants are sprayed, broken up and plowed under, depriving both the bollworm and white fly of the food and habitats they need to complete their life cycles. Previously, some farmers kept cotton plants in the field year-around as perennials, assuring the pests a full stomach, Cox said.

Although the farmers use less water and chemicals because of the shorter season, their yield per acre now matches or exceeds that produced over seasons nearly twice as long, Wrona said. That’s due partly to a technique called “plant mapping,” a close monitoring of cotton plant growth that dictates the amounts and timing of irrigation and chemicals that farmers apply.

The crops of Cox and the other Imperial Valley cotton farmers represent a tiny fraction of the California harvest of 1.3 million acres, most of it concentrated far north of here in the San Joaquin Valley. But the increase in acreage is a significant advance from 1991 when it appeared that the bollworm and the white fly had vanquished local growers for good.

The pink bollworm made its way here came from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Thus far, the tiny beast has largely been kept out of the San Joaquin Valley, partially with the release there of millions of bollworm moths that have been rendered infertile by radiation.

Cox knows that the good market for cotton won’t last forever. He’s been farming long enough to have seen the ups and downs of several commodities and how they are dictated by events far beyond his control.

During his first year of farming after graduation in farm management from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the 1973 Arab oil embargo doubled the price of cotton because petroleum-based polyester fabrics were suddenly less available. But the high prices led to record crops--and lower prices--in the late 1970s.

U.S. farmers today are reacting to high cotton prices the same way. According to Calcot, cotton acreage planted in Georgia, for example, during the crop year that started Aug. 1 will reach 1.4 million acres, a 63% increase from last year. The bigger crops will eventually dampen prices overall.

So despite today’s improving cotton market, many Imperial Valley farmers are still reluctant to plant it because of cotton’s risks. They are sticking with wheat, Sudan grass and alfalfa instead, crops that cost about $400 per acre to produce, compared to cotton’s $1,000-per-acre cost.

But Cox feels good about cotton again. “I’ve regained my confidence in my ability to produce a good crop,” he said. “But I’ve had to set aside all I learned about cotton in my first 18 years of farming to get to this point.”

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Cotton is Back

Cotton is making a comeback in the Imperial Valley after a series of pests and low prices caused most farmers to virtually abandon the crop in the early 1990s. Higher prices and better farming techniques have improved cotton’s profitability.

Cotton acreage harvested in the Imperial Valley, in thousands:

1995: 9.2

Source: Imperial County Agricultural Comissioner