Farmers from Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee spent a week visiting California farming operations as part of the National Cotton Council's Producer Information Exchange (P.I.E) Tour, which later this year will see California growers visit two Texas operations.

The tour is an annual event that has seen more than 1,100 cotton growers from across the United States visit other regions of the country to see first-hand how growers produce crops in those areas. The event is sponsored each year by Bayer through a grant to The Cotton Foundation.

Aside from California cotton farms and gins, growers from the Mid-South visited with the California Cotton Ginners and Growers Association, saw two different Bayer Research Facilities in the Central Valley, visited a table grape operation during harvest and saw a host of other crops being produced, including hundreds of different varieties of lettuce for seed, pistachios, almonds, carrots, onions, peppers and processing tomatoes.