This has been a tough week, with many walking cotton planted in mid to late May to find stands thinner with more gaps than acres planted in April. The number of cotton acres within the state appears to be decreasing despite several growers still planting. Subsequently, in the past few days, I’ve had calls complaining about seedling vigor of every commercial cultivar. Unfortunately for us, seedling vigor and seed quality have almost nothing to do with the failed stands from our last planting window- even marble-sized seed of the highest quality will drown when forced to suffer through prolonged saturated conditions. That said, a few callers this week pointed to one cultural practice as the saving grace on their acres, with others mentioning their desire to incorporate the practice on some of their acres in the future. In this blog, I’ll describe the underlying reasons for why that practice may only fit a portion of our acres- but for the acres on which it fits, it rarely results in the need for a replant. I’ll also talk briefly about the lessons those who cannot use the practice might apply to their acres.
The slider above includes two pictures of cotton planted by the same planter, on the same day (May 22, 2025), within the same field (Milan, TN)- the two areas are approximately 200 ft apart. Click and hold your pointer over the dividing line and slide it back and forth to see the striking differences associated with bedded versus flat ground this year.
Our agronomic production system is large and complex. Allow me to strip the system down and focus just for a minute on a single germinating cotton seedling. Conditions which would be described as ideal for a young cotton seedling would be a uniform, firm, warm seedbed with soil moisture near field capacity (approximately 50% solids, 25% water and 25% air). Unfortunately, our no-till soils often hold much more than 25% water when we get into springs like the one we experienced in 2024 and 2025. Bedding ground modifies the seedbed by increasing soil temperature and decreasing soil water content around the seedling.
I’d like to pause here to emphasize an extremely important point. I am not building a case for bedding an eroded hillside, or highly erodible ground. Highly erodible ground should be managed appropriately to increase surface residue and minimize soil surface disruption. Tennessee adopted no-till to fight environmentally unacceptable and economically unsustainable levels of soil erosion largely driven by bedding rolling ground for cotton, a crop which notoriously generates little organic matter. Beds were previously the go-to practice for cotton because the plant requires warm, dry soils to thrive. Tennessee currently leads the nation in the number of no-tilled acres and has one of the highest rates of cover crop adoption. It took decades of research and innovation from growers, scientists and engineers to develop our current system- and it is a system of which we should be very proud. Still, as good as this system is, it is far from immune from occasional failure. Unfortunately for cotton growers, when it breaks, it often breaks with bottom-ground cotton.
Bedding annually may not be necessary, as several within the state have had luck planting into stale beds that are 3-5 years old. Many regularly consider bedding and (rightly) choose to keep their ground no-till. I completely understand the labor and window of opportunity constraints for bedding ground, as well as the potential environmental impacts of the practice on some acres. For fields where beds are simply not an option, I would urge you to look into tile drainage as a possible solution. For other fields, we may be limited to other methods of surface drainage and/or water control structures.
For those that can bed, I would suggest you think about the practice much like you think about insurance- you carry the policy with the hope that you won’t need it. But when you end up with a year like 2025. . .or 2024. . . or 2023, 2021, and 2019. . . you have the protection when you need it.
Take home: Cotton can’t survive prolonged periods of saturation, regardless of seed quality. Although all of us must play with the hand we are dealt, a few in our area have options.
