November 15, 2006
“Tell him to put something in the paper about this four-and-a-half bale cotton,” the voice on the radio crackled.
A grinning Nicky Burgess shook his head at the request from one of his picker operators. “That's not four-and-a-half bale cotton,” he said, explaining that he had calibrated the monitor on that operator's picker with another and both were reading high.
Burgess, precision farming specialist for the Fullen Land and Management operation near Ashport, Tenn., said he would adjust the yields accordingly after the harvest was completed.
Whether the readings were accurate or not, the cotton on the Fullen farm in the “Tennessee Delta” along the western edge of the state certainly looked like it was approaching 4.5 bales. Or maybe the fact it was planted on 15-inch rows just made it look like more.
While much of the area suffered from a lack of rainfall in 2006, the fields on the Fullen farm experienced a phenomenal year. Tennessee farmers, as a whole, appear to be harvesting one of their best crops ever.
“We seemed to get a rain whenever we needed it,” said Burgess. “We still had to run our center pivots, but we were getting rains when other farmers around us were missing them.”
The 7,000 acres of cotton on Fullen farm lie in a narrow strip of land along the Mississippi River that looks more like the Mississippi Delta than the rolling hills that make up most of west Tennessee. The land west of Ashport toward the river has deep, alluvial, “Delta-type” soils.