Warm Summer Might Have Saved This Year's Cotton Harvest

"We're not sure at this point what the effect on the crop is going to be," Verett said. "But we do know for a fact, that because of where the maturity of this crop was, it's not as bad as it could have been."

            Farmers typically see a first freeze in early November.

            Steve Verett, the executive vice president of Plains Cotton Growers, said while the freeze came early,so did the harvesting and he thinks that may have saved a lot of cotton crops.

            "Harvest started a little bit earlier," Verett said. "Because our warm temperatures this summer kind of pushed the crop along, so we actually had some cotton harvested around the 20th of September"

            Koby Reed's family has been harvesting cotton in Gaines County for five generations. He said he thinks most of his crop will be ok.

"I think a majority of this cotton was ready anyway," Reed said. "A lot of people were out spraying it, getting it ready. There is still a lot of that later cotton that needed just a little bit more time."

            The South Plains is home to one of the largest cotton growing regions in the world and has struggled after suffering the worst drought in Texas history in 2011.

            Farmers, like Reed, said it is important for the weather to cooperate now for the future of the cotton industry.

            "So it's ideal now that we have perfect conditions," Reed said. "Perfect conditions are, you know dry weather, but we seldom get that, but what we do need are dry conditions to get that crop out then, then we want lots of rain."

"Farmers in this area are used to not having things the same way every year," Verett said.  "If they had two years that were the same in a row, you know that would be the anomaly."