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Georgia:
UGA Research Helps Farmers ‘Hire’ the Best
Cotton
By Brad Haire
University of Georgia
(October 16, 2008) -
What do plants really do during the growing season? It is a sort of
mobile laboratory equipped with various sensors used to measure
different readings in and around the cotton.
It’s not the wires and tubing dangling from the
handcrafted metal cart that make it stand out in the south Georgia
cotton field. It’s the pink and white girl bicycle tires.
When asked about the tires, Glen Ritchie smiles.
“The people who engineered it up in Athens (Ga.) must have had a twisted
sense of humor,” said the cotton physiologist with the University of
Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. “We’ve
gotten a lot of attention for some of the gadgets we use to collect
data.”
Ritchie routinely uses a car-sized blimp to take
aerial pictures of cotton fields.
The cart, though, brings the view down close to the
plants. It is a sort of mobile laboratory equipped with various sensors
used to measure different readings in and around the cotton. Ritchie
will use the data to write a more detailed story, so to speak, of what
the plants are doing during the growing season.
The research will help farmers manage the crop
better and make informed decisions on what varieties to plant in the
future. Most important, he said, they’ll know how a plant will perform
throughout the year.
“We really haven’t been able to incorporate much
physiology into variety selection over the years,” he said. ”Variety
selection and recommendations to growers pretty much come from just
looking at yields and quality at the end of the year, and you go from
there.”
But much happens in a cotton field from planting
until harvest. “What I want to know is how we got from point A to point
B,” he said.
 In
a perfect scientific world, time and money aren’t limited. It would be
nice to know, for example, how a variety would perform over a 100-year
period in one location. But that’s not possible. Variety trials take
place in only a few years.
Pushing his cart through the cotton, Ritchie
collects data on plant height, root system, vegetative growth, sunlight
capture and temperature. He compares these measurements with soil
moisture, and with the number and location of the plant’s bolls, or the
fruits that produce the cotton lint.
“With a limited number of years, which is the
reality, we have to develop ways to identify these factors to determine
what the variety’s real response will be over time and dial into what it
is doing,” he said. “We’re looking for factors to improve growth habits
and pick the varieties that do well and know what management strategies
the variety needs to grow best.”
Finding a cotton variety to use, he said, is like
hiring a prospective employee for a job. First, as much information as
possible needs to be learned about the applicants. Once the decision is
made, the next thing is to help the new employee reach full potential.
This year, Ritchie collected data on 15 varieties,
some available and some not yet available to farmers. Each variety was
grown with and without irrigation to determine its performance in
drought and nondrought conditions.
Many Georgia cotton farmers are looking for a new
cotton variety to hire, or plant. Over the past few years, Delta Pine
555 has become their workhorse variety. It accounts for 75 percent of
the state’s total cotton acreage. Over the next few years, it will be
phased out due to the company’s decision to sell cotton with a slightly
different genetic makeup.
“So, many growers want to know what they can do and
what recommendations we’ll have for them,” Ritchie said. “With this
research, we’ll have some answers for them.”
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