It is late enough in the planting season
that cotton producers need to try and keep the stands they have
if at all possible, said J.C. Banks, cotton specialist and
director of Oklahoma State University’s Southwest Research and
Extension Center.
“When evaluating damage, look at the
terminal for initiation of new growth; also, the plant needs to
have a root free of seedling disease to be able to recover,” he
said. “If the terminal is lost, the plant will make use of its
vegetative branches.”
Cotton with four true leaves has the
potential to produce three vegetative branches below the
terminal, the dominant, upper main stem part of the plant. Each
of these branches will essentially develop into a cotton plant,
causing the overall plant to appear more bushy than normal.
“Cotton in the cotyledon stage that loses
its terminal will not develop into a plant,” Banks said. “If you
observe plants with extremely large cotyledon leaves with an
absence of terminal growth, the plant has lost its terminal and
will not survive.”
Banks recommends waiting a few days
following a storm to evaluate the cotton. This will allow the
plant to initiate new terminal growth. Many times when looking
across a field of damaged cotton, the light green color of new
terminal growth can be observed.
“Count the plants with new terminal growth,”
he said. “If you count 16,000 plants per acre on dryland or
20,000 plants per acre on irrigated land, and if there are not
too many skips more than three feet on adjacent rows, the crop
is normally worth taking to harvest.”
On 40-inch rows, a producer can measure 13.1
feet of row, count the plants and multiply the count by 1,000 to
determine the number of plants per acre. Producers should
measure 14.5 feet for 36-inch row spacing and 17.4 feet for
30-inch row spacing.
Additional information about Oklahoma cotton
management is available through the NTOK Cotton Web site at
http://ntokcotton.org on the Internet. NTOK Cotton is
a partnership that supports cotton production in northern Texas,
Oklahoma and Kansas.
The OSU Southwest Research and Extension
Center is part the university’s Division of Agricultural
Sciences and Natural Resources, through DASNR’s two statewide
agencies: the Oklahoma Agricultural Experiment Station system
and Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service.
