Seshadri Ramkumar

Posted November 1, 2017

 

By Seshadri Ramkumar

 

LUBBOCK, Texas – Maintaining market share, enhancing consumer awareness and continuous investments in R&D are needed to advance the cotton sector.

 

Steve Verett, executive vice president of Lubbock, Texas-based Plains Cotton Growers, Inc., advanced these points during a speech at Texas Tech University (TTU) about the 2017 cotton crop and the industry overall.

 

Speaking a conference room in the chemistry building at TTU, Verett quipped that chemistry drove him away from agro science to business, when he joined Texas Tech in the fall of 1971. On this visit, Verett returned to the chemistry building four decades later as a most respected leader in the U.S. cotton sector, interacting with students and scientists on the current state of the United States’ cotton industry.

 

Verett, who farms 5,000 acres in Crosby County, is a Tech graduate with an accounting degree.

 

Providing a brief the current crop estimates from High Plains, two weeks lost due to cool weather in late September and early October would cost this year’s crop, but still High Plains’ crop would be good, he said.

 

“It is hard to get additional heat units in October for maturity,” said Verett.

 

Commenting on the estimates by the USDA, he said that due to established procedures at the end, they come out to be right. Projected crop from the High Plains this year will be about 5.44 million bales, while for Texas, it will be 9 million bales.

 

Asked about the survival of High Plains’ cotton industry in the next 20 years, Verett said he is very optimistic as this area’s weather will support crops like cotton, which is highly drought tolerant. There is a need to produce quality crop for the reason that the market for U.S cotton is overseas. Even though U.S. consumers use textiles equivalent to 20 million bales, 80 percent of the crop is exported.

 

In answering a question from this scribe, Verett agreed that the U.S. cotton sector can have competitive and distinct advantage over other cotton producing countries by producing contaminant-free cotton, with reliable delivery schedules and supplying consistent quality output.

 

Professor Eric Hequet, chairman of TTU’s Plant and Soil Science department and a renowned fiber quality expert, highlighted the importance of maintaining a market share of 30 percent globally for cotton so that seed companies, textile mills and textile machinery companies will be motivated to find new products that can advance the industry. The U.S. has done a better job in this regard with about a 50 percent share due to promotion campaigns by the cotton industry.

 

The take-home message here is that, with global population heavily concentrated in Asia, it is important that cotton maintains a healthy market share in those parts of the world.

 

Dr. Seshadri Ramkumar, Ph.D, FTA (honorary), is a professor at the Nonwovens & Advanced Materials Laboratory at Texas Tech.