If you’re going to talk Delta cotton over the last few decades, Will McCarty had better be among the handful invited to the party. The veteran Mississippi State University cotton specialist, now retired, brings a gentle drawl, a great sense of humor and a bittersweet reminder of what the region lost when it turned away from the crop.

A raconteur of Mississippi agriculture, McCarty is the kind of gentleman you can sit across the dinner table from and just listen to. One of his main messages is not to shrug off the importance of history.

“Honestly, you have to know where you’re from to know where you’re going. Growers did particular things for a reason, they made changes for a reason – understanding and remembering that can help future decisions.”

Know history

Unfortunately, there aren’t “a whole lot of people left around who remember where we’ve come from and that’s a shame,” says McCarty. “I was thinking the other day about all the people who were my mentors who have retired or passed on.  There are still some here and a significant pair is Johnny Jenkins and my brother, Jack McCarty, at the USDA boll weevil lab in Starkville. They’ve both been with USDA for well over 40 years and have worked to make advances in cotton plant breeding. A lot of the germplasm that companies are now using is from stuff they developed.”

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The two researchers, he says, did the first test — “outside a greenhouse in a real cotton field” — of Bt technology in the United States. And that was done despite having to deal with and navigate regulatory headaches.

McCarty has told this story numerous times to “open eyes as to where we are and how far we haven’t come when you’re dealing with some regulators. For the most part people in the regulatory chair are very knowledgeable , they may not always be knowledgeable in the practical side of things.

“While in the permitting process to allow planting of the Bt cotton, I was in my office one day and got a phone call from a person in EPA. The EPA employee wanted to know about the farm, about the people who’d be doing the testing.

“He asked, ‘What are their plans? How will they keep this from escaping into cotton in surrounding areas?’”

At the time, the closest commercial cotton farm from the Plant Science Research Farm at Mississippi State was about 30 air miles away.

“I said, ‘They’ll have a buffer zone and keep it plowed around, yadda yadda.’

“He asked, ‘Well, what steps will they be taking to keep the seed from blowing out into an adjacent area?’

“I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly and hesitated. He sensed that and repeated the question. I said, ‘Wait. Blowing out?’ He said, ‘Well, yeah, doesn’t cotton have a wind-disseminated seed? Isn’t that what the lint is for?’ I took the next 20 minutes to nicely explain the program to him.”

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As he was doing this, the lightbulb went on for McCarty.

“Here was an EPA guy, a guy who has the power to say ‘no’ to one of the biggest breakouts we’ve had for cotton research. And he thought cotton had a wind-disseminated seed! Sitting in that seat and he knew absolutely nothing about cotton? That still amazes me.”

Old colleagues

McCarty brings up his old colleague, George Mullendore, Mississippi Extension cotton agronomist (http://bit.ly/GeorgeMullendore).

“One thing George had was a tremendous memory and he could relate that to what was happening at the moment. I picked up on that and, even when doing presentations, I’d go back 25 to 30 years to tell folks what we once did. Hopefully, that approach leads to ‘here’s what we’re doing now and why.’”

McCarty laments that too many in the younger generation of cotton producers “don’t understand that. You’ve got farmers now who’ve never farmed without Roundup Ready technology, never had to spray for boll weevils 16 times, never had to pay extremely high prices for some of the chemicals they use like Pix. Can you believe when it hit the market in 1980, Pix was over $100 per gallon? Dropp defoliant is another which hit the market in the early 1980’s and still a standard today.  Back then it would cost you $15 to $25 per acre — in 1980’s dollars! — to put out a labeled rate. Prep was new on the market and not cheap either. The first gallon of Fusilade I saw was over $300 for a four-pound formulation. But even at those prices, those were very effective and efficient products.”

McCarty and colleagues knew planting stale seedbed/reduced-till was a good program to adopt. But at the time, “Paraquat and Roundup was so expensive you could hardly afford to put out a burndown. You could plow five or six times for what one burndown application cost.”

The story McCarty tells also involves the cobweb of numerous ag sector chemical companies. “There have been a lot of company merging and product juggling in the last 30 or so years.”

One of those juggles resulted in a name and price change of Paraquat to Gramoxone.  “When that price change happened, Round-up responded and that’s when people started looking at burning down and planting stale seedbed. Just knowing it was a good practice was not enough, the economics cost had to balance before we widely adopted the program.”

That, in turn, meant farmers began looking in earnest at no-till/reduced-till systems.

Transgenics came on the scene in the mid-1990s and, at first, led to “some litigation and learning curves. About the same time frame, we started boll weevil eradication came on and we had some tense times there, as well. In all actuality, releasing Bt cotton and starting boll weevil eradication together for us was a great mix.  Without weevil eradication growers would have still been left in the trap of having to spray heavily throughout the season, statewide.”

That amount of struggle, though, meant cotton producton had come to a place “where it could be farmed fairly easily.”

Swapping out

Brought to that place, “You’d think cotton would have had a huge boost. However, the opposite happened.  In the mid-1990’s we planted from 1.2 to 1.4 million acres each year, by 2007 acreage had dropped to under 400,000. “Folks wanted to quit growing it. Eradication of the weevil was a huge mountain for us. We eradicated the weevil, man! The day we started with eradication in Mississippi, we had as many acres in this single state as existed east of us at the time.”

Cotton farmers had Bt and Roundup technologies, no weevils, “and life was good.” But almost immediately, “we dropped over half our cotton acres. It hurt my feelings,” he says, chuckling.

When McCarty began working in cotton, “you started a year and incorporated Treflan maybe twice, put out a pre-emergence herbicide, put out Temik and a fungicide in the drill, applied preemergence herbicides, cultivated 3 to 5 times with a directed spray program and then a layby herbicide, applied organophosphates for worm and weevil control and then defoliated. Add it all up and we were applying something like 24- to 25-pounds of active ingredient of pesticides per acre on cotton.”

After reduced tillage came on the scene, Bt handled worms, and following boll weevil eradication and prior to the emergence of plant bugs as a major pest, “we went from 25 pounds per acre to maybe 4 or 5 pounds per acre. Just on Mississippi’s 1 million cotton acres, that was 20 million pounds of pesticides that weren’t going into the environment. Our science and agriculture people were the foundation of that and yet no one talks about it.”

Not many people even remember a Dickey Cultivator and fenders, “much less know how to set one.  However, cultivating and direct spraying at 3 miles per hour is not something people would want to do again.”

McCarty is yet to be sold on promises of an all-encompassing technological, hands-removed manner of growing cotton in the future. He’s convinced it will always require dirty boots and dirty hands.

“I’m all for technology and the advances are great.  I recently sat in a tractor that was steering itself and planting at 9 miles per hour – and got a perfect stand. Advances are great and coming fast, but we still must put the human element into it – knowledge and common sense. While the remote sensing is great to help establish zones and highlight subtle differences, in my opinion, there’s no way you’re going to fly a drone or plane over cotton and tell me exactly what’s wrong and then be able to fix it with the press of a button. I’m all for advancing technology and utilizing it in farming but the role of a highly trained fieldman and educated grower will not be diminished, but rather will be increased. Someone still has to climb out of the truck and go take a look.”

A related story: http://bit.ly/CottonCornShift.