January 26, 2007
Delta Winner, Joe Bostick, Golden, Mississippi
Nestled into a corner of northeast Mississippi, cotton producer Joe Bostick must sometimes feel like a forgotten man. There is no irrigation here to bump cotton yields to super-high levels. Soils are thin and not always forgiving. This year, the only rain of any consequence came on the heels of three hurricanes that blew through the Gulf of Mexico.
But success isn’t always built on what we have, or what Mother Nature doles out. Rather success is measured by what we do with what we’ve got. And Joe Bostick is doing some good things with his 1,050-acre cotton operation near Golden, Miss.
For those accomplishments, Bostick has been named the 2006 High Cotton Award winner for the Delta states. He farms with his two sons, Ryan and Nathan, who help out at harvest and planting. There is full-time hand, Dale Ray, and part-time hand, Josh Brown, who helps out after tending to his job as a football manager at the University of Mississippi. Moral support comes from Bostick’s fiancé, Teresa Singleton, who works at the La-Z-Boy factory in nearby Belmont.
Bostick graduated from Mississippi State in 1971, and taught agriculture to high school students full-time while farming part-time with his father, Charles. He took over the cotton operation when his father retired in 1982.
He had taken cotton out of his crop mix in 1978 after the local gin closed, turning his attention to grain and soybeans. “We didn’t have Pix and cotton would just get too big,” Bostick explains.
In 1991, he started growing cotton again, and he’s been at it ever since. “He came back to his bread and butter,” says his consultant, Homer Wilson, who has been working for Bostick since 1996.
The return to cotton production was made without Bostick’s father, who died in an automobile crash in 1985 at an intersection a hundred yards from the farm headquarters.
Soon after returning to the crop he loved, Bostick emerged as a conservationist and top-notch cotton manager, eager to increase efficiency on the farm. He began with water and soil — building and maintaining terraces and grass waterways, improving drainage, and converting to no-till in order to conserve soil, fuel, and labor.
“One of the greatest benefits of no-till is the increase in organic matter,” consultant Wilson says. “There was a train of thought here in the hills that the ground was supposed to do what it was supposed to do. We really never used to give much thought to how our practices were affecting our yields.”
In fact, Bostick’s topsoil is very thin — just a few inches thick before running into barren red clay. Many fields are highly erodible, making his soil conservation efforts even more important. “You have to take care of it, or you’re going to be in trouble,” Wilson says.
Trouble often came in the form of stunted plants. “We were applying so many yellow herbicides that those thin places with no organic matter couldn’t handle it. Joe tried to build organic matter with corn, but in some cases, corn would die if we tried to rotate on some of this land.”
Bostick says, “No-till has provided us with the organic matter in the soil to handle these herbicides, although we don’t have to use as many now that we have herbicide-resistant crops. But no-till was a great plus, and has boosted our overall yields. It brought yield between poor land and good land closer together.”
He continues to rotate cotton with corn on a field-by-field basis. “We notice when the cotton yields start dropping during the year, and we try to rotate it with corn the following year. The soil needs a rest from the cotton.” He can usually count on a 150-pound yield increase in cotton following corn.
No-till has helped from a labor perspective as well, Bostick says, noting that. “dependable farm labor is almost non-existent in this part of the country.” Controlling and slowing the flow of water on cotton fields is an ongoing project. During rains, he will often travel around the farm to get a better understanding of how surface water moves across his fields. His farm sits on a divide between the Tennessee-Tombigbee and Tennessee River waterways. Some land drains into the Tombigbee basin, but most drains into the Tennessee basin.
He’s built parallel terraces on larger fields, diversion channels, and wide grass waterways. Drainage pipes built into the terraces take water off the fields into a ditch, lake, or a wooded area. To keep soil on the farm, he’s installed grass turnrows on most of the field edges. The grass – some seeded, some volunteer – also does a good job of keeping down dust.
He’s built parallel terraces on larger fields, diversion channels, and wide grass waterways. Drainage pipes built into the terraces take water off the fields into a ditch, lake, or a wooded area. To keep soil on the farm, he’s installed grass turnrows on most of the field edges. The grass – some seeded, some volunteer – also does a good job of keeping down dust.
Bostick is known for rescuing some tough ground from potential ruin and making it profitable. For example, he acquired one field in 1991 where erosion “had torn it up pretty badly. I signed up with the Soil Conservation Service and we built it up with terraces and ran drainage pipes.”
He has dramatically improved yields on the field, too. “In the long run, you make more cotton with the terraces.” In 1995, Bostick took advantage of USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program to help pay for converting to no-till cotton production on a couple of 50-acre fields. The cost-share program helped him purchase no-till equipment, and helped launch a 100 percent conversion to no-till.
A conservationist and a good farm manager have a lot in common, says consultant Wilson. “One thing that impresses me most about Joe is that he carries out recommendations quickly and accurately. From time to time, I might see a low spot that might need some drainage or some dirt work, and I’d tell Joe about it. It wouldn’t be long before it got done. He doesn’t put things off.”
“Conservation can be aggravating sometimes,” says Bostick, who does his own dirt work,“but in the end, it’s worth it. If you have a weak spot in the field and you let it continue to wash, it gets worse. If you’re willing to go the extra mile, it will pay.” He has won several local awards for his conservation work, serves as chairperson of the FSA county committee, and has also served as commissioner of the Tishomingo County Soil and Water Conservation District.
In nominating Bostick for the award, Wilson noted, “He has many fields with a 50-foot, fringe wildlife area that also catches runoff and prevents stream pollution. He uses these practices to protect the land for future generations, specifically his sons’ future livelihood.”
Phillip A. Horn executive director of the Alcorn/Tishomingo County FSA office, noted, “Joe has set the benchmark on all aspects of hill farming, and through his example, showed others that it can be done.”
There is no age limit on the beneficiaries of Bostick’s efforts. One afternoon in late September, he hosted a group of first graders from nearby Tishomingo Elementary School. Each had a small sack for picking a few bolls of cotton. He and his hands stopped the cotton harvesting operation long enough for the kids to fill their sacks and ask a few dozen questions about the crop. It was hard to tell who was having more fun — the kids, or Bostick.
Southeast Winner, Cliff Fox, Capron, Virginia
For Virginia growers Cliff and Clarke Fox cotton is something new, but soil conservation and good stewardship are generations old. The Fox brothers with some sage help from their father, Trent Fox, grow 950 acres of cotton, 200 acres of peanuts, 325 acres of corn and 150 acres of soybeans at Foxhill Farms in Capron, Va.
Though Cliff and Clarke Fox have developed Foxhill Farms into a diversified agricultural business, farming is a multi-generation operation for the Fox family. winners of the 2006 High Cotton Award.
Cliff and Clarke Fox got an early introduction into farming from their father Trent. Their grandfather was a banker, who worked closely with farmers in Southampton County. Both Clarke and Cliff graduated with degrees in agricultural economics from Virginia Tech. Both their father and grandfather also attended Virginia Tech.
After graduating from college, Clarke returned to the farm and began the process of converting his father’s part-time farming operation to a modern, diversified operation. When Cliff graduated from college, he chose to work with Southern States Farmer’s Cooperative in the southeast region of Virginia.
In 1991, he joined his brother in the farming operation and Foxhill Farms became a corporate entity. Since that time, the farming operation has diversified away from a dependency on peanuts to cattle (for a few years) and on to cotton in 1994.
Located about 70 miles south of Richmond and 75 miles west of the Atlantic Ocean, Foxhill Farms is in the heart of Virginia’s historic Southampton County.
For over 200 years cotton was king in Southampton, but WWII and the need for domestic oil from peanuts brought a new crop to the area — peanuts. Add to the increase in peanut production, continued cotton losses to boll weevils, and by the 1950s cotton was no longer king and by the 1960s it was gone from Southampton County.
Ironically, what nature and the government gave and took from Southampton County farmers has gone full circle. The boll weevil eradication program brought cotton back to the county and the end of the government supported peanut program has dramatically reduced the popularity of the crop to area growers.
“We planted our first crop of cotton in 1994,” notes Cliff Fox. “My dad started farming this land in the mid-1960s, but he didn’t remember much about cotton, so the first 100 acres we planted was done with very little knowledge about the crop,” he said.
“For our first cotton crop, we broke the land and ripped and bedded it,” he recalls. “It didn’t take us but one crop to figure out we needed to do something different, the younger Fox brother stresses.
“My father was one of the first to use strip-tillage equipment in the county in 1969 for some of his corn fields, so he knew a great deal about conservation tillage — all we had to do was adapt it to cotton,” Fox laughs.
For their second crop of cotton in 1995, they bedded the land in the fall and planted a wheat cover crop. They killed the wheat a couple of weeks prior to planting cotton in the spring. “The second year was better, the Virginia growers remember, but even with a cover crop, the bedded land is flat, and when it gets water on it, the water doesn’t have a place to go, so it makes it own way, causing us a lot of erosion problems,” the Virginia grower explains.
Though growing dryland cotton in Virginia has been a challenge, the Fox brothers have consistently topped two bales per acre. This year is likely to be in the 1,000 pound per acre range, with some fields topping three bales per acre. One of the keys to keeping yields high, they agree, is taking care of the land.
Growing cotton has been a work in progress for the Virginia farmers. Cliff laughingly recalls his first experience with Pix. “I over did the Pix a little bit and the cotton never met in the rows. We had a good crop of cotton, and a real good crop of weeds — that’s a battle we don’t want to try again,” Fox muses.
In 1998, the Fox brothers bought a KMC strip-tillage rig, which has been good for both cotton production and conservation practices. The eight-row rig has a ripper shank in front, followed by four fluted coulters and a two basket configuration behind that. Though they continue to tweak the rig, it produces an excellent seed bed for cotton. “We handle our cover crop a little different from some growers,” Fox says. “We have found that when we kill the wheat 2-3 weeks prior to running the strip-till rig, the stubble tends to go away before we plant,” he said.
They use a burn down herbicide, either glyphosate or paraquat, depending on the weed history of the field and time of application. “If we don’t have a real strong stand of wheat, we wait until the first true leaf of the cotton crop to kill the wheat,” he says. By waiting until the first true leaf of the cotton crop, he saves one pass over the field and glyphosate has no negative affect on Roundup Ready cotton.
Cotton varieties stacked with herbicide and insecticide genes have changed the way cotton is grown — for the better, according to the Fox brothers. “For one thing, these varieties have allowed us to grow cotton with no cultivation. If we need to get into our cotton for escaped weeds, we use a directed, hooded sprayer,” Fox points out.
In some years strip-tillage costs more in herbicide costs in some crops, but being able to use glyphosate on cotton has greatly reduced the need for herbicides. “For our operation, the big increase in cost has been the technology fee,” Fox says.
Some savings come from application of Orthene tank-mixed with the first true leaf application of glyphosate. Thrips are a constant problem for young cotton in the Tidewater area of Virginia.
They typically come back in the fifth true leaf with another application of glyphosate, which usually takes care of most weed problems. “If problem weeds come back later in the growing season, we go back with a hooded spray application, usually Suprend, which has worked well for us,” Fox contends.
Loss of the peanut program has created problems for Virginia farmers, regardless of other crops grown. For the Fox brothers, it has meant a decrease in peanut acreage, which affects their rotation program for cotton. Ideally, they rotate cotton with corn and peanuts. They have replaced some of their peanut acreage with soybeans, which works well in the rotation, but doesn’t have the profit potential of peanuts.
Always innovative, the Virginia farmers would like to take advantage of many of the new high-tech farming systems that are available. “We farm about 2,000 acres of land, but we have over 200 individual fields,” Clarke Fox points out. “Some of the new, high-tech, precision agriculture systems are just not practical for us,” he adds.
“When we first went to module builders to replace bale wagons, people would stop on the side of the road to watch and often ask us what the contraption was,” Cliff Fox recalls. Now, he says, virtually all the cotton picked in Southampton county is moduled. One of the biggest changes in cotton production over the past 10 years for the Fox brothers has been with varieties. “Of the cotton varieties we started with in 1994, only Deltapine 51 is still available, and it’s being phased out,” Cliff Fox points out.
We do variety tests with pesticide companies and with Virginia Tech researchers at Tidewater Research and Education Center in Holland” (Holland, Va, is about 30 miles from Capron, Va.), Fox says. He points out that being in the northern end of the Cotton Belt has meant fewer varieties that are bred for Virginia growing conditions.
Farming on land that is prone to washing and erosion problems has likewise been a challenge for the Virginia growers. Cover crops on all their land, strip-tillage and drainage tiles on most of their land have proven to be successful for both erosion and crop production.
“On land with bad wash problems, we have installed grass waterways,” says Cliff Fox. “Some we do ourselves, but on some land we have a company from nearby Suffolk come in and construct the waterways,” he said.
The grass waterways are typically 60 feet across, with the bottoms of the drainage ditch at least 8 feet wide. These waterways are graded back to natural levels and seeded with grass. The concept is to provide a gentle grade, not a ‘V’ shape.
“We are trying to create a way for water to get off the land,” says Fox. Critical to these grass waterways being efficient is to clean off the banks periodically, because dirt builds up in the grass, creating multiple pathways for water to run across the field. “If you don’t keep the banks of the waterways clean, you get two or more ways for water to get off the field, creating a bigger problem,” Fox said.
Another key to the conservation system is to place heavy rocks at the end of the waterway. Otherwise, Fox says, the volume of water will be so heavy it will break the end of the waterway. Conservation practices are an everyday part of the operation at Foxhill Farms. The Fox brothers routinely triple rinse chemical containers and place these in a trailer. Once the trailer is filled, they take it to a warehouse, where the plastic is picked up, ground into pellets and reused in the plastic industry. They also recycle all the used oil from the farm. These services are provided through the local Virginia Tech Extension service.
They also participate in a used tire program with the Soil and Water Conservation District. “We recently bought a farm that had thousands of used tires discarded on several sites on the farm. Working with the Department of Environmental Quality, we found a regional company that would pick up these tires for a fee. Since that time, we have recycled all the tires from our farm,” Fox said.
Foxhill Farms has several miles of drainage tiles — another holdover from the conservation practices of Trent Fox. “We spend a lot of time keeping drainage tiles working. In the winter that is one of Cliff’s biggest jobs,” Clarke Fox notes. For Cliff and Clarke Fox cotton is becoming a part of the tradition that includes Virginia Tech, conservation, good stewardship and strong family support.
Southwest Winner, Lawrence (Buck) Braswell, Raymondville, Texas
Buck Braswell walks through stalks left standing from last year’s cotton crop, stopping occasionally to kick up remnants of grain sorghum stubble, residue from 2004. He stoops, digs his hands into the loose, grayish-black soil and sifts it through his fingers, like a miner, panning for gold nuggets.
No shiny stones turn up here but Braswell picks out bits and pieces of rich organic matter, decomposing and adding value to his South Texas fields. He points to a tractor and bedding rig running across the far end of the field and explains how he’s rowing up a bed, through last summer’s cotton stalks, for next spring’s grain sorghum crop. He says soil erosion will not be a significant problem in this field.
Braswell values soil and does all he can not only to conserve it, but also to make it better than he finds it. Conservation makes sense. He contends that the better he maintains the soil the better cotton crop it will make. It makes economic sense as well, saving him trips across the field, allowing him to farm more acreage with fewer and smaller tractors, less expensive diesel fuel and fewer man hours.
And yields remain equal to or better than many farmers who continue to follow conventional tillage methods. Braswell’s dedication to conservation, along with his unselfish willingness to help other growers learn about and adopt conservation practices, earned him the 2006 Farm Press High Cotton Award for the Southwest.
Braswell will accept the award in January at the Annual Beltwide Cotton Conferences in San Antonio, Texas. He made his first reduced-tillage crop in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in 1992. He had done some conservation tillage in Mississippi before moving to Texas. “Yield on that first con-till crop was just as good as conventional,” he says.
He’s refined the system since and follows the same basic procedures in both cotton and grain sorghum. “We’re producing crops as good as anyone around us,” he says. Braswell plants cotton in grain sorghum stubble and grain sorghum in cotton stalks. “We never pull stalks,” he says. “It’s important to leave those stalks.” He says, in addition to adding organic matter to the soil, stalks and root systems keep channels open for water to penetrate and for the next crop to follow to moisture. “I always follow the same rows, every year. Controlled traffic is a key for conservation tillage.”
Braswell follows a fairly simple procedure. He uses a John Deere Max Emerge planter. “I just add a disk on the front to move dry soil,” he says. “I put out seed, no insecticide hoppers, no herbicide tanks. I just plant. And I use bulk seed, so we don’t have to lift bags anymore.” Braswell doesn’t use a total no-till system. “I put up a little row,” he says, “and use the same ones every year.”
He likes to “bed up the land” in the fall, after September rains. “I don’t want to bed up too early, because all rain water will run off when the middles are clean of debris,” he says. “I leave the stubble in the beds to hold that moisture and will put up beds in October. Then I hope we get rains before planting to replenish moisture.”
He manages residual stalks with a Prep Master before planting. “I kill cotton stalks just after harvest with 2,4-D to prevent boll weevils from reproducing late in the year. I may hit it three times. I get checked a lot on stalk destruction, but this system works better than mechanical destruction. Often I can’t find any (stalks) alive after spraying. I can get near 100 percent stalk destruction by spraying. I can’t do that well when pulling stalks.”
He says growers have to be meticulous about spraying to assure proper coverage. He runs the Prep Master over grain sorghum stubble too, usually a week before planting. “I have no trouble getting a stand with minimal-till cotton,” Braswell says. “That was a concern back in the early 1990s but since 1995 and 1996, we’ve gotten excellent stands. But we will do whatever it takes to get a cotton stand. We only get that one shot at it, so we make certain we get it up. I rarely have to replant.”
Weed control has posed few problems either. He uses all Roundup Ready varieties and will apply Prowl pre-emergence only to irrigated acreage. “I may use some Diuron in a rainy summer. “I’ll plant as many Roundup Flex, stacked varieties as I can get in 2006,” he says. “Roundup Ready has made a big difference in farmers’ acceptance of reduced tillage systems.” He expects Roundup Flex, with a broader application window, will be even more useful in reduced tillage systems.
The current system has worked well. “I have no serious weed problems but I realize that Roundup is not good on some weeds, and I could run into some trouble down the road.” He uses a hooded sprayer to take care of in-season weeds. He’s careful with spray application, for either weed or insect pests. “Spray drift can cause a lot of damage and ill will,” he says. “But we can spray without drift if we do it right. We have to be aware of the wind.” He uses a high cycle and a hooded spryer for spraying insecticides and herbicides. He is careful with either.