La Nina Loosens its Grip on the Cotton Belt

La Nina Loosens its Grip on the Cotton Belt

Haylie Shipp
Haylie Shipp
With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I’m Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.

Eric Snodgrass, Science Fellow and Principal Atmospheric Scientist with Nutrien Ag Solutions says that there are signs that the La Nina that’s plagued the Cotton Belt is fading out. So what’s that mean for cotton growers this year?

“We’ve finally gotten rid of this thing that’s plagued us for three years, and that’s La Nina.”

Goodbye La Nina, means introducing El Nino, What’s that look like?

“Now you look historically at every El Nino event that we’ve got good records of, you’ll find that generally speaking we see a reduced number of tropical systems. So when we get into hurricane season late because that’s very important to the cotton crop, you can sometimes get a needed rain or you can sometimes get so much rain and wind that you destroy the crop. This is a year where we’re possibly thinkng at a slight reduction in overall hurricane activity. Everybody that’s listening to this knows that it just takes one to cause damage but that could be an interesting late season feature to be on the lookout for.”

Overall, he says that it’s a much more positive lookout in 2023 than 2022. Again Eric Snodgrass, Science Fellow and Principal Atmospheric Scientist with Nutrien Ag Solutions

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