Cotton farmers racing to harvest crop

LYNN COUNTY, TX (KCBD) - With the heavy amount of rainfall expected to hit us here on the South Plains, farmers are racing against the clock to get their cotton harvested before the storms get here.

It would be a normal sight to see headlights in the dark fields this time of the year.

But, most fields are pitch black, because it's just too humid to harvest.

Steven Brosch is a farmer and says he has 6,500 acres of cotton planted across Lynn, Lubbock and Garza County.

"There's a point there, that once the humidity just starts climbing, the machines just don't work right, the cotton's not pulling," he says.

He says harvesting all of his cotton is a huge task, especially with the weather we're all expecting to experience.

"We started harvesting last Friday, was our first day to pull any cotton," he says.

He explains that though it's not unusual to harvest at this time of year... it's the time crunch he now faces that has worries him.

"Go as fast as you can, of course, you can only do so much and we can't control Mother Nature," the farmer says. "But, yea we're definitely, we're pushing as hard as we can to get what we can out, before all of that rain."

He says he is keeping a close eye out on the weather.

"If we do get three, four, five inches of rain, yea, it's going to, definitely going to slow harvest down," he says. "It'll be a little while before we can get back in then."

Brosch has six crew members working around the clock, but remember even if those water drops aren't coming down they're tracking those humidity levels.

"We're hoping to harvest every bit of it," he says.

Tuesday afternoon he had all of his cotton equipment running. Between the cotton strippers going up and down stripping the cotton from its dry stalk, to the boll buggy transporting the plush lint over, and the module builder- creating these 21,000 pound cotton blocks.

"The cotton stripper just keeps running, running, and running," the cotton farmer explains.

Brosch's crew was busy until 9:30 Monday night and after monitoring those humidity levels, he says they started up again at about 10:30 Tuesday morning.

He says he and his crew are just working as quick as possible and hoping for the best.

"We'll see what we can do and get as much out as possible and then, see what happens," Brosch says.

The farmer explains that though the rain is not ideal, it won't completely wipe out his crop, but hail would be the worst case scenario.

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