4 Min Read
PHOTO; USDA Agricultural Marketing Service
USDA cotton classing fees will remain at $2.30 per bale for the 2018/19 season, says Keith Maloney, area director for the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service cotton program at Dumas, Ark., which classes cotton from western Mississippi and southeast Arkansas. There will be the usual 5-cent discount for collection agents.
The Dumas facility classed 1,298,129 bales for the 2017/18 season and is projecting 1.45 million to 1.5 million bales from this year’s increased acreages in the two regions. “For the 2017/2018 season, we classed 34 percent more cotton from Mississippi compared to 2016/17,” Maloney says. “In southeast Arkansas, classings were up 43 percent over 2016/17. Other classing statistics for the 2017/18 crop were: