THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 17, 1995 TAG: 9510170257
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
North Carolina farmers faced with a future of uncertain tobacco profits are turning to a familiar friend to make up for lost revenues: Cotton.
Cotton planting increased 65 percent this year after last year's crop brought some of the highest prices since the Civil War and growers sought to get in on the bonanza.
Last year's benchmark was $1 a pound. The price has declined in recent weeks to about 82 cents a pound due to weather and other factors. But the potential for success in the years ahead remains high.
``Cotton is still king - and is going to be king,'' said Gordon Berkstresser, a professor in the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University.
North Carolina farmers planted 802,000 acres of cotton this year compared to the 486,000 acres they planted last year.
Heavy rains in June followed by a dry August mean yields are expected to be lower than last year, when North Carolina growers sold cotton totaling $215 million.
But droughts in cotton-growing areas of the former Soviet Union and Pakistan, as well as consumer dissatisfaction with other fibers, should keep demand high for the North Carolina crop.
North Carolina cotton tends to bring a good price because the fields are near the many mills in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina that buy cotton and turn it into yarn or fabric.
The growth in cotton also has meant a recovery for the state's cotton gins. Many gins shut down when cotton acreage reached its low point in the 1970s, but North Carolina now has 45 gins, including a new one in Anson County that will serve farms in a 65-mile radius as cotton creeps back into the Piedmont.
Keith Edmisten, a cotton specialist at North Carolina State, said cotton from the southeast is now regarded as stronger than cotton from Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee - the mid-South states synonymous with the fiber.
Edmisten wants to promote cotton production in the ``blacklands'' of Hyde, Tyrrell, Beaufort and Pamlico counties, which have soil rich in organic matter.
Weeds have traditionally been a problem for blacklands growers. But scientists have developed a cotton variety that is genetically resistant to some herbicides, allowing growers to spray over an entire crop but kill only the weeds.
The idea that North Carolina still has room for more cotton fields comes as a surprise to Harris Josey, 30, a Halifax County cotton grower.
``There's more acres and more people growin' than we've ever had before,'' he said while guiding a cotton picker through his fields outside Scotland Neck. ``I didn't think we could grow any more. I didn't think there was any land left.'' ILLUSTRATION: ASSOCIATED PRESS color photo
Workers push cotton out of a picker on a farm in Halifax County.
Uncertain tobacco profits have led many farmers back to cotton.
by CNB