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2019 Cotton harvest

Producer Dan B. Smith hits the fields, trying to make the best of a hard year.

Shelley E. Huguley, Editor

November 8, 2019

12 Slides

Cotton harvest is underway in the Southwest. From basket strippers and pickers to balers, the Texas landscape is littered with harvest equipment gathering the 2019 crop.

Producer Dan B. Smith and his employees Johnny Peralez and Frank Jimenez, all of Lockney, Texas, harvested one of Smith's drip-irrigated crops, Nov. 5, despite high humidity.

See, Harvest rains complicate an already struggling cotton crop

"We're stripping this cotton and it's about 55% humidity, which normally, I would never do, but this cotton is starting to come out of the burr, and they've forecast up to a possible inch or two of rain, Wednesday and Thursday, so we're going slow," he said Nov. 5. "I don't like to do it but if this cotton gets rain on it, it's going to be a lot worse."

Harvest has been paused throughout out much of the Southwest until the moisture clears. 

See, Texas producer Dan Smith says cotton yields not what they thought

About the Author(s)

Shelley E. Huguley

Editor, Southwest Farm Press

Shelley Huguley has been involved in agriculture for the last 25 years. She began her career in agricultural communications at the Texas Forest Service West Texas Nursery in Lubbock, where she developed and produced the Windbreak Quarterly, a newspaper about windbreak trees and their benefit to wildlife, production agriculture and livestock operations. While with the Forest Service she also served as an information officer and team leader on fires during the 1998 fire season and later produced the Firebrands newsletter that was distributed quarterly throughout Texas to Volunteer Fire Departments. Her most personal involvement in agriculture also came in 1998, when she married the love of her life and cotton farmer Preston Huguley of Olton, Texas. As a farmwife, she knows first-hand the ups and downs of farming, the endless decisions made each season based on “if” it rains, “if” the drought continues, “if” the market holds. She is the bookkeeper for their family farming operation and cherishes moments on the farm such as taking harvest meals to the field or starting a sprinkler in the summer with the whole family lending a hand. Shelley has also freelanced for agricultural companies such as Olton CO-OP Gin, producing the newsletter Cotton Connections while also designing marketing materials to promote the gin. She has published articles in agricultural publications such as Southwest Farm Press while also volunteering her marketing and writing skills to non-profit organizations such as Refuge Services, an equine-assisted therapy group in Lubbock. She and her husband reside in Olton with their three children Breely, Brennon and HalleeKate.

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