Cotton acreage expected to decline across the South this season as corn planting increases

[JohnWxy]

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20070409-0021-farmscene-cottonseason.html

Cotton acreage is expected to decline across the South this season as farmers, faced with high production costs and cotton from last season remaining unsold, move to corn or soybeans, crops with higher profit potential.

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Cotton can be more expensive to produce than corn, costing farmers in parts of northeast Louisiana, where considerable farmland is irrigated, up to $450 an acre, said Keith Collins, Richland Parish agent for the LSU AgCenter.

Statewide, USDA projects corn planting in Louisiana to more than double this year, to 700,000 acres. If the projection holds, it would be one of the biggest corn plantings in the state in decades, agency figures show.

In neighboring Mississippi, Justin Ferguson, a regional manager for that state's Farm Bureau Federation, expects “one of the biggest crop changes in the Mississippi Delta that's ever happened, just from total switches from cotton to corn.”

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As the supply of corn grows this will put downward pressure on corn prices (already moving down in 2007 - about 10% so far). Also, subsistence cotton farmers in third world countries may actually be able to make more from selling their cotton than just enough to survive - with less competition form Export Subsidy supported (bringing the price down) U.S. cotton to compete with.__JW

[JohnWxy]

1. Corn prices and petroleum prices vs PPI -- very interesting:

http://www.ontariocorn.org/ethanol/spec0796.html

[bahrbearian]

2. No Switch Grass?

[Vexatious Ape]

3. I read somewhere a while ago that cotton farmers in Brazil

where kicking American cotton growers in the ass. Despite our subsidies.

[JohnWxy]

4. probably why these farmers aren't making enough money in cotton and are switching.

[youngdem]

6. Cotton farming in Louisiana can be incredibly lucrative

It is one of the last real ways for a farmer to have a very good life. Louisiana soil is so good in some regions of the Northeast part of the state that the per acre yields are higher by multiples than other regions of the state.

Corn is just easier to grow. In Louisiana at least, all you have to do is plant it and cut it. I grows like a weed. Cotton is complicated, fickle, subject to slight weather problems, requires TONS of fertilizer, the seed is expensive, and if it rains once the buds open, you have a field full of fuzzy, wet white useless shit.

Still don't understand why marginal farmland isn't being targeted for switchgrass cultivation instead of stopping cash crops in place of more corn. Corn is a negative delta anyway. Switchgrass is the only ethanol source I am aware of that has a positive delta.

Ethanol is such a boondoggle.

[JohnWxy]

11. Louisiana is one of the areas in the U.S. where growing sugar cane is feasible. and that is far more

productive in terms of ethanol.

Ethanol price support is $.50 per gallon of blended gasoline paid to the gasoline refiner!

IF you are interested in boondoggles check out what the real cosat of gas is:

http://www.progress.org/gasoline.htm . Various eastimates put the true cost of gas at anywhere from $5.50 a gallon to over $15.00 (if you include the military budget devoted to securing foriegn oil fields.) This of course doesn't attempt to put a cost figure on the loss of over 3,000 American lives in Iraq.

Hip-hip hooray for dependence of foreign oil.

[hunter]

14. And we could import Haitians to work the cane fields!

Everybody wins! Rah, Rah!

Now then, should we teach our own kids to mine coal or to grow sugar cane? Or maybe we should just ask them to join the army because they are needed in Iraq to protect our oil, you know.

Sugar cane production is a grim business, more so than other crops. There are very good reasons for things like this:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_plantations_in_Hawaii

Sugar cane production destroys both people and the environment.

The thought of some fat ass affluent American filling his car with sugar cane derived ethanol is utterly disgusting.

[gravity]

17. It's not that they can't make enough money growing cotton

They can just make more growing corn, now that we are heavily subsidizing ethanol.

[JohnWxy]

5. I saw a documentary on PBS about African cotton farmers (very small scale) and they are just barely

surviving. They along with others are the reason the complaint was brought to the WTO about U.S.'s use of export subsidies. The complaint was upheld. Last February the Republican controlled Congress put a bill on bush's desk for signature that would have stopped all cotton export subsidies ($4 billion /yr). but the never signed it.

[JohnWxy]

7. USDA forecasating $3.20 - $3.32/bu for 2006/07

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/PriceForecast/Data/Futmodcorn.xls#'2006-07 forecast'!A1


Weekly forecast of the corn season-average farm price received and implied counter-cyclical payment (CCP) rate for crop year 2006/07:

          Season-average farm price           CCP rate
          received Dollars per bushel

Futures model forecast           3.32           -0.97 (a negative value implies a CCP rate of $0.0)

Midpoint of WASDE projection           3.20          -0.85

[Javaman]

8. who cares about clothes or food, as long as we can drive!!!

Drive Naked!!! (I think that was a popular bumper sticker at some point)

[NNadir]

9. Well we could use oil based polyester clothes to drive our ethanol

cars.

As we will likely to be starving, we won't need much cloth. Ghandi didn't.

[Javaman]

10. Ghandi was a trend setter. :) nt

[Shallah Kali]

15. It's worse than that. People will starve so the wealthy can drive.

not that people aren't starving today with the way the world works. It just will be there will be more poor than ever going without while the wealthy have all the food, clothing, vehicles, etc.

Think of the Irish Potato Famine - massive food exporter to England while people starved to death.

[NickB79]

12. How fertilizer-intensive is corn over cotton?

Because from what I've read so far, corn requires quite a bit MORE fertilizer than cotton. Unfortunately, synthetic fertilizer is made from natural gas, an energy source that is rapidly being depleted and has actually peaked in North America.

No free lunches, I suppose.

[JohnWxy]

13. You might check out reply #6. I quote: "Corn is just easier to grow (than cotton)"

"Corn is just easier to grow. In Louisiana at least, all you have to do is plant it and cut it. I grows like a weed. Cotton is complicated, fickle, subject to slight weather problems, requires TONS of fertilizer, the seed is expensive, and if it rains once the buds open, you have a field full of fuzzy, wet white useless shit."
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But some areas of Louisiana may be even more suitable for sugar cane where it is already grown and sugar cane is much more productive as ethanol feedstock than corn.

[NNadir]

16. Oh good. We can replace biofibers with synthetic oil and coal based polymers.

Growing corn to shove into cars is still stupid, as will find out in the next several years when all of these distillaries start <em>failing</em>.

I used to be agnostic on ethanol, but more and more it looks like a disasterous shell game. It's unsurprising that petroleum imports continue to rise, even after years of ethanol scam threads.

[razzleberry]

18. cotton is a horrible crop

better corn, than the human suffering
caused by the lust for the power to
control money you pump
out of the ground