Texas Dryland Cotton Farming Case Study
- 1 hour ago
- 7 min read
We all know that dryland farming has many challenges, particularly in arid environments where drought continues to plague much of the region. The perceived risks of trying new farming methods keeps many farmers continuing with decades-old practices that are not yielding the desired results given the decrease in soil fertility, changing markets, and increased cost of inputs.
This case study was developed to show how cropping planning can help producers make changes with reduced risk and gaining greater understanding of what the key challenges are for an operation and where they can get the greatest return for their investment of time and money. The name of the operator and the exact location have been changed to provide anonymity for the producer in this case study.
Background
Sue Peters and her father, David, operate a predominantly cotton and cattle farm, on the 1,200-acre Peters Family Farm, in the west part of Texas. Sue says she is not naturally a “data” person but she’s been playing around with regenerative practices on the 100+ acre wheat patch field. She rents that land from her father and uses it for grazing as she moves the cattle between there and native pasture. None of their land is irrigated.
In the fall, Sue plants a small grain in that field and Haygrazer (a sorghum/Sudan grass) in the summer. This 100 acres has been in a no-till system for four years. Sue had heard that it is normal for production to suffer as you convert from tillage to no-till, and that is true on this acreage. She also struggles with giant mustard, and she believes that the mustard is a primary succession plant, and that she will have less issues with it the longer she leaves the soil undisturbed. She has also not fertilized this acreage because, 1) She needs to conserve monetary resources, and 2) She wants to encourage biological activity in the soil.
The first year she began this system, she planted a diverse mix of cover crops. This was unsuccessful due to drought conditions. Based on that unsuccessful experiment, she has since only planted a single species to limit financial input. She has sprayed herbicide on this acreage twice in the four years, once to combat giant mustard, and once to try to address encroachment of mesquite.
Additionally, Sue and her father farm 1,000 acres together that they have enrolled in the Climate Smart program. Historically these acres have been continuous cotton, reduced tillage, not fertilized, and with generous use of herbicides. As part of the program, they’ve committed to winter cover crops and no-till. They’ve been in this program for a year, and it’s gone fairly well. There was not sufficient moisture to get a very good stand on the cover crop, but it was enough to reduce wind erosion, and in 2025 they had a better cotton crop than they’ve had in several years, although they took insurance on 700 acres and the 300 acres that were harvested made slightly better than 250 lbs/acre.
Frustrated and losing faith on how much regenerative agriculture can help, Sue took HMI’s Cropping Planning Course to gain clarity and direction. Her question was: “Looking at my experiments on my 100-acre plot and considering the lack of productivity, how much can be attributed to drought and how much to my management? As much as I want to find a method of production that I can feel good about, I’m losing faith and getting frustrated.”
Outcomes from HMI's Cropping Course
HMI Certified Educator Preston Sullivan took the main role of mentoring Sue through the course. As a result of the support, Sue learned how to improve her ability to collect and record data, understand some key agronomy basics, and learn how to read soil analyses. Sue found the weekly calls with Preston to be “invaluable in the education, motivation, and encouragement” that she received.
Because Sue took the time to run the economic data and analyze the key issues that she was facing, she had the clarity to approach her father to do a “safe to fail” trial on 10-acres of the cotton farm to explore not only agronomy practices that would improve soil health but also allow her to experiment with other cash crops that she could scale that would have 4 times the gross profit/acre that cotton currently is paying. She now feels inspired and more confident in her ability to experiment and adapt to improve the economic and biological outcome of the farm.
As Sue says: “Before I took the course, I was making blind decisions. I thought I was moving in the right direction. I thought I knew what was happening on my land, but it was all intuitive, nebulous. It was a feeling. I had no clear direction aside from my goal of healthier soil. HMI’s Holistic Cropping Planning course taught me how to monitor the health of my land by taking measurable data points so I can see clearly the effect my decisions are making over time. Before I took HMI’s Cropping Course, I was carrying a mental list of things I needed to do, or “should” do, but didn’t know exactly how to proceed. That lack of direction and accountability left me feeling overwhelmed and stuck.
“This course forced me to find and use my resources. It helped give me the knowledge and confidence to speak intelligently with my professional community which resulted in networking, brainstorming, and, ultimately, building relationships. This course helped train me to be proactive, rather than reactive. It gave me a framework for clear planning rather than a vague idea, or worse, doing the same thing I’ve always done because I don’t have a clear vision of what it would require to do something new or an educated vision of the outcomes I could expect. Before this course, the future for our farm felt dismal. Now, though I’m still distinctly aware of the challenges my environment presents, I feel hopeful about the future.”
The Planning Process
The first step in the process was to give HMI staff background on what had been trialed and a map of the farm. HMI also used this information to provide some data from the NRCS Soil Web Survey that suggested that this property’s soil types were predominantly clay loam. Range production for a “normal” year of rain was determined to be about 2000 lbs/DM/acre.
Rainfall average is considered 16-20 inches with rains coming mostly in the spring and potentially early fall. However, drought has plagued the area for well over a decade (according to an article in the Texas Tribune) thus making many farmers rely on crop insurance as their primary source of income.
The next step was for Sue to inventory her fields in terms of notable key issues which included a high amount of erosion as well as weed pressure like herbicide-resistant Palmer amaranth, giant mustard, Russian thistle, and purple nightshade.
Sue also shared a soil analysis, which showed that there was a high pH and that an application of sulfur was recommended to lower the soil pH in this alkaline soil. While there were other recommendations from the soils lab, the sulfur was the key item that Sue felt she could work with at about $20/acre for a custom liquid application. In addition, she is planning to address compaction issues that are impacting erosion issues with the short-term solution of including a tillage radish cover crop for the cool season and for the long-term she will plant sorghum/Sudan grass as a warm season cover/rotation. Ultimately she feels she needs to add more organic matter but the current price for compost and chicken litter are $50-100/acre which she can’t afford. For that reason she will be testing using livestock as a rehabilitation tool that provides income on a test plot as that may be a possible option in the future on larger acreage if the soil health improvements are promising.
Then after considering what she could add to address resource concerns like fixing nitrogen, pollinator habitat, wildlife food, provide vertical structure, increase soil cover, and grow carbon, she added some additional species in her cool-season mix like rye and Austrian winter pea, as well as Haygrazer, sweet clover, Sunn hemp, and Teff in her warm-season mix.
With HMI’s Living Root Worksheet Sue was then able to begin mapping out her crop sequence/production plan for the year with cotton planted from June through December and her cool-season covers for that field going in from December-April. On the wheat field, she would plant her summer cover crop from May-October and then plant a cool-season grazing mix in that pasture from October through March.
The Economics
Now that Sue had a clear sense of what she needed to improve land health and resilience, and how she could integrate those strategies into her crop production, she needed to take the next step and explore what other options there might be for cash crops to improve the gross profit per acre. Using HMI’s Cash Crop Planning worksheet and digging deeper with some gross profit analysis on various crops (including the cotton harvests in the past), Sue could see that grain sorghum had the potential for doubling the gross income per acre. In fact, the gross profit analysis showed a 4 times higher gross profit on the grain sorghum with lower input costs factoring in.
While Sue had tried a small patch of sorghum in the past, she had been discouraged by wild pigs taking out the crop. With this new knowledge of potential greater gross income, Sue decided to try another test plot that she would use electric fencing to protect against the wild pigs. Likewise, she used the crop sequencing worksheet to work out a rotation between cotton and grain sorghum as the current plan to move away from continuous monoculture cropping along with off-season covers.
Sue’s last step was to map all of these different factors and timelines into one place with HMI’s Cropping Planning chart so she would have a record of why she was planting crops and when and what the intended impact was on various resource issues.
Sue noted that key outcomes for her from the course were:
● Provided key monitoring indicators
● Framework for planning ecosystem strategies integrated with cash crop realities
● Builds confidence through better understanding of how to analyze different options
To take your farm and cropping planning to the next level, learn more about HMI's Cropping Planning Course. You can also read this blog about another cropping planning course participant growing grains in Canada.
