Houston 1st, September : The cotton sector in Texas is experiencing its most difficult harvest in years due to extreme heat and drought local media reported.Cotton is Texas the state’s largest agricultural export and crop and in an excellent year, it can bring in around $4 billion-$5 billion for the US state’s High Plains region alone, which includes 42 counties that stretch across Lubbock to the end of Panhandle in the northwestregion, Xinhua news agency reported the Texas Tribune report as saying on Wednesday.
The International Center for Agricultural Competitiveness at Texas Tech University estimates that the cotton production in Texas’s High Plains will be down by at minimum $2 billion this year, and we are expecting only half of the usual annual yield.
“There’s no crop available,” Brad Heffington, cotton farmer whose farm is located 40 miles to the northwest of Lubbock said to the newspaper.
“A large amount of cotton was burned and a good portion of it never was able to be made up to begin with.”
While a large portion of Texas has experienced rain over the past two weeks of the drought, experts believe it’s already two months late for this year’s crop.
Texas’ High Plains produces an abundance of cotton and cottonseed, which accounts for the equivalent of 66 percent of the total yield of the state more than three-quarters of the harvest in the US and 4 percent globally in accordance with the report.
This poor harvest could increase costs for consumers.
Cotton is also the source of hundreds of jobs in the state in related industries, such as warehouses, ginning companies, and processing facilities.
Texas is currently experiencing the worst drought since 2011.
As 95 percent of the state is suffering from dry conditions, farms have been forced to reduce their losses and cotton is just one of many crops that are suffering from the drought, as the report stated.
