I’ve spoken with several who planted a few fields last week. Soils have been a little cooler than we would prefer but it was hard to keep the planter at the shop with 60+ degree soil temperatures at 3” at 8 AM with warm temperatures in the forecast. Moisture is currently not hard to find in most areas given you caught some of the showers that came through last week.
According to the National Weather Service (NWS), the coming week looks very favorable for planting cotton. The unbelievable part of the forecast at this point is the forecasted 5 day DD60s for 4/25-4/29. I’ve included the max, min and DD60 calculated from NWS forecasts for Dyersburg, Memphis, Jackson and Fayetteville below. At all four of these locations, forecasted DD60s for the next 5 days fall within the VERY GOOD category for estimated planting conditions (see below table).
There is a chance of rain mid-week for most of West and Middle Tennessee but the forecasted amounts vary from .2” to .5”. With the forecasted temperatures, these rainfall amounts do not concern me greatly. However, there are two things I would change about the forecast. It appears that more rain might follow the Wednesday/Thursday showers and these showers are forecasted to precede a cold front moving through Tennessee the first few days of May (highs in the upper 60s and lows in the low 50s). At this point, it is hard to get a good feel for how long that cold front will remain in our area.
The only thing worse than a cold snap is a cold snap with wet feet. Most of you remember the cold snap we struggled with mid-May of last year. Fortunately, it appears this one may come through earlier in the year and (fingers crossed) will likely move through in plenty of time to give us several more days of good planting conditions near the end of our ‘ideal’ planting window.
Take home? Keep an eye on the forecast and I will continue to update forecasted planting conditions as things change. This window looks very good, but a forecast is an educated guess while hindsight is 20/20.
