O.A. Cleveland, Cotton Marketing Expert, Bids Farewell

We did have a USDA crop progress report released there at the end of June.

It's been a couple of weeks since we came to you.

So this one's kind of awkwardly timed.

It was a little over a week ago.

USDA came out with a crop progress report.

It's our most recent one as we record here on July 7.

But it showed that, you know, virtually the entire crop, it's been planted.

And we got about 37% of the crop that is squaring already.

So we're moving right along.

Maybe a little more interestingly, USDA released their planted acreage report there on July 1, and it told us that y'all planted about 200,000 more acres than you had indicated you would plant back at the March planting intentions survey.

So just for reference, in 2025, we planted 9.2 million, almost 9.3 million acres of cotton in this country.

In March of 2026, we indicated that we were gonna plant 9.6 million acres per USDA.

And now on July 1, as USDA is finished with their counting, we actually have planted 9,850,000 acres of cotton in 2026.

Now, of course, you all know that will not be what we harvest.

There's gonna be some attrition.

But not a terrible number at the end of the day.

We obviously, you know, we saw the price of cotton went on a little run there in April and May, and that certainly encouraged some late acres just before, you know, we got into really hot and heavy planting.

And that's a good thing.

It's good for y'all, and it's a good thing for Cotton Grower Magazine.

Now, our old pal, Dr.

Don Shirley, a cotton economist with University of Georgia, he wrote a column on this that we published at cottongrower.com, and he noted that that slight uptick in acres is actually probably a little underwhelming, a little bit less than we might expect, but we also know that there are other variables in play when our guys are penciling out their planting options right before planting, notably the steep cost of key inputs this season.