A friend of mine shared a picture over the weekend of a dead snake on a fence and he’s recently started closing emails with the line ‘PRAY FOR RAIN’. As for me, all of my truck windows are down, the sprinkler is on in my yard, and I’ve got clothes hanging outside even though the dryer in the house works great.
Drought conditions have developed through much of West Tennessee and much of our cotton crop is beginning to show signs of stress. Cotton is a drought tolerant plant which can tolerate water deficits, but we are reaching a point where yield has been impacted. I’ve had numerous discussions over the past week on heat unit accumulations, Node Above White Flower (NAWF) counts at first bloom, and how we should think about insect thresholds when the fruiting positions currently on the plant may makeup the largest percentage of our yield at the end of the year. In this blog, I cover heat units accumulated until today, spend some time describing the target development curve out of Arkansas and how the curve is developing in the 2022 TN crop.