There are axioms in any business and a big one in farming is it is not a good idea to introduce something new in a bad farming year.
More than one new, truly promising cotton variety has been shot dead by growers at the starting gate just because it was introduced during a poor production year, regardless of the fact it may be the weather or insects that caused it to be a less than ideal season. Ditto for new production techniques or new chemistry.
Ultra narrow-row (UNR) cotton is not a new idea. It has been floundering around California and Arizona for at least three decades, stymied by the lack of an efficient harvesting system.
However, there has been a breakthrough in harvesting UNR. Its first public, commercial demonstration, though, left a lot to be desired for the innovative Northern San Joaquin Valley producer who agreed to try a large scale trial of UNR for demonstrating the unique Deere UNR picker mechanism.
It may have been a fitting end to an already challenged growing season.
The only version of narrow-row cotton in the West that has really caught on is 30-inch cotton. It has replaced considerable, traditional 38- and 40-inch cotton, especially in California and somewhat in Arizona, because it allowed growers to put about 25 percent more plants in the field and more plants usually means more yield.
Key to evolution
The key to this evolution was a pair of farmer-modified two-row, straddle-row pickers in the mid-1970s that opened the door to narrow-row cotton. At least one company later developed commercial kits to modify two-row pickers to pick narrow-cotton. Straddling one row while picking two was not very efficient, but it was good enough to win converts to 30-inch cotton and encouraged two major commercial picker manufacturers, Case IH and John Deere, to develop larger four and six-row factory 30-inch pickers. These machines propelled narrow-row to widespread acceptability.
However, any row-spacing less than 30 inches wide still had to be gathered with either a brush harvester or a finger stripper. Those things gather probably twice as much trash from tall, high yielding Western cotton as they do cotton bolls. Brush harvesters and stripper are about as welcome at a cotton gin as a colony of red imported fire ants at a nudist summer camp.
Also, any moisture from rain or heavy fog shuts down the harvester instantly. Growers who have had success with stripper or brush harvesting have had to terminate the crop very early to make sure they dodge rain or fog and that reduces yield potential. Others who have tried to cheat the rain and fog have experienced disasters.
The UNR breakthrough has been promised in the West with Deere's unique 12-row picker that gathers cotton in rows spaced 15 inches apart by slicing off plants in one row and feeding them into an adjacent machine row where they are wrapped around other plants from an adjacent 15-inch row. Twisting together plants are then fed through a spindle picking mechanism.
First West showing
It has received a lot of press and rave review in other areas of the Cotton Belt where yields increases of 100 pounds per acre have reported. Deere ran it for the first time publicly in the West this year in 15-inch cotton at San Juan Ranch near Dos Palos, Calif. where ranch manager Daniel Burns planted about 180 acres of no-till cotton, herbicide-resistant cotton in 15-inch rows in one of the worst planting seasons in recent memory.
It was so late he left one field for dead — too late to replant. However, to Burns' surprise it came up.
Overall, Burns was not totally displeased with the stands in the three fields.
The 15-inch cotton trial at San Juan Ranch was part of a large scale, University of California trail comparing single row 30-inch cotton, double rows planted 7.5 inches apart on 30-inches beds and the 15-inch UNR.
Burns has been pioneer in the double row 30-inch cotton, which has out-yielded single row 30 consistently since he started growing it in 1998. It really outperforms conventional single-row-to-a-bed cotton in a poor year like 2005. During the seven years h