Camp Hand, UGA Cooperative Extension cotton agronomist, was cited in Southeast AgNet, discussing how more cotton needs to be grown this year after the state industry saw its lowest planted acreage in 30 years last season.
“I don’t want to hear how it doesn’t make sense to plant cotton. It doesn’t make much sense to plant anything to be honest with you,” Hand said. “We’ve got to pick something that we’ve got the equipment to handle and the infrastructure to deal with. We do not have the infrastructure to handle the amount of corn we planted last year. We’ve got a surplus on peanuts. Peanut prices are not expected to be extremely high like they have been the last couple of years.
“People have cotton equipment. We have gins. We have got to plant it whether people like it or not.”
Last year’s drop was about 20-30% down from normal.
“It’s the lowest it’s been since 1993. You start thinking about what was going on in 1993; that was pre-transgenics. We were still working on boll weevil eradication. There’s a lot of things that happened, and that kind of swung the pendulum to where cotton was king again in Georgia,” Hand said. “Those two things happened. We started planting cotton, and we hadn’t dipped below a million planted acres since 1993 until 2025.”
However, those who followed through with planting last year did have good production, making the second-best crop ever.
“A lot of gins we talked to, they talked about acres were down, but we ginned more. It all kind of worked out,” Hand said. “The quality’s been good. Yields have been really good. We need to swing the acres back in the right direction.”