Writer: Rod Santa Ana III, (956) 968-5581,r-santaana@tamu.edu
Contact: John Norman, (956) 968-5581, j-norman.tamu.edu
WESLACO – In terms of dollars and acreage, cotton is still king among agricultural products grown in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, but it’s not the giant it once was.
A historical cotton report written recently by a South Texas cotton expert shows that the Valley had 137 cotton gins operating in 1949, and that almost 1 million acres of cotton were planted in 1951. Those peak figures compare with only 14 cotton gins today and some 270,000 acres of cotton expected to be planted this year.
John Norman, a cotton IPM entomologist at the Texas Agricultural Research and Extension Center at Weslaco, compiled the report, “An Historical Listing of Cotton Gins, Acreages and Yields in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas,” by poring over archives dating back to 1920.
“It’s interesting to note, for example,” said Norman, “that at one time Edinburg had six cotton gins. Today they don’t have any. There was one at Red Gate, one at Citrus City (west of Mission), one at La Joya, one at La Sara, and even one at Stockholm, a tiny community west of Lyford. And it didn’t happen all at once, but over the years the vast majority of these gins went out of business.”
Competition was one reason for their disappearance. Since growers are charged for each bale of cotton ginned, many took their business to newer, more efficient gins that charged less, leaving behind the older gins with costly, outdated equipment that eventually closed shop.
“The numbers in this report tell a story,” said Norman. “For example, we’ve never come close to the almost million acres of cotton that were planted in 1951. But if you look at the trend of bales (500 lbs.) produced per acre, you can see that cultural (farming) practices and improved cotton varieties have taken us from a third or a half bale per acre to our current average of one bale per acre,” Norman said.
The numbers also tell the story of an insect that changed the face of agriculture in South Texas, northern Mexico, and indeed, the world.
“The low bale production here between 1968 and 1970,” he said, “shows how the tobacco budworm ravaged our cotton crops after becoming resistant to the insecticides that had been used to control them. It practically knocked northern Mexico out of the cotton business. Before then they had been growing about 150,000 acres of cotton every year, but, to this day, they produce only about 20,000 acres per year.”
Norman said the tobacco budworm’s resistance to insecticides led to grower demands at the state and national levels for an organized defense against devastating insects. What resulted was the now-universally accepted practice of integrated pest management (IPM) whereby growers use a variety of tactics to manage pests, as opposed to using insecticides indiscriminately.
“Since then,” he said, “the IPM program has turned the focus toward scouting a field to determine first whether insecticides are needed, instead of haphazardly spraying too early, too late or when it wasn’t even necessary.”
Norman said the IPM approach to managing pests proved so successful, it spread to many other crops and other parts of the world.
For a copy of the report, contact Norman at 968-5581, or visit the Weslaco Center Web site at http://primera.tamu.edu.
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