"Jim Webster" wrote in message
...

Gordon Couger wrote in message
news:3e5f17a9_3@newsfeed...
there is a saying I cannot quite remember about the value of a peck
of
March dust. Basically if you can get dust in march it means you have
the
possibility of a decent seedbed, shortage of water is not even
thought
of as a problem.

It's a lot cheaper to lose a crop to dry weather over here than it is
to wet
weather. On my wife's place in west Texas the dry land cotton was
dusted in.
For those of you that get rain regularly that is planted in dry ground
and
wait for a rain to bring it up. When it got a shower to get it up at
wind
evaporated the moisture before it could meet the moisture a few inches
below
the surface and the cotton sprouted and died. I have had the happen a
time
or two as well. It won't happen again on that place it will have the
drip
irrigation installed it by the end of next week, if it doesn't rain.

funnily enough we have the phrase "puddled in" where things are sort of
wet and the seed bed isn't really good enough but you know fine well
that it isn't going to get any better.

It should take the yield from 300 pounds per acre to better than 2,000
pounds per acre.

Even here we had one chap who did a bit of irrigation, just to ensure
grass got the absolute optimum during April/May, and he showed an
economic return. Then the Environment agency started asking if he had an
abstraction licence and that would have made it uneconomic.
Your increase is impressive.

It is easy to increase yields in 20 inch per year rainfall area. There is
not enough rain to interfere with the irrigation schedule. Actually yields
on drip cotton this year out there were up to 2,500 pound per acre but it
was a hot dry summer perfect for irrigated cotton.

Drip irrigation out yields conventional irrgation because they never allow
the soil to become water logged which slows down the growth of cotton a good
deal. All other method have to water log the surface of the soil to get the
water on. With cotton it is very important because it uses so much water and
the number of days to set fruit is limited to about 60 to 70 days in that
area. An early cool spell in the fall can cut yields a lot.

I flew out to that area one year in late November to look at cotton stripper
a fellow was thinking of buying and there was cotton that would make two
and three bales to the acre that didn't have an open boll on it because of
an early frost.

Gordon

Gordon