Auburn, August 30, 2002 --- One thing the 24^th Annual East Alabama Cotton Tour drove home is the fact that cotton producers are dealing with a world of differences compared to a quarter century ago when the tour first took place.

(Above: Dr. Dale Monks, Extension crop physiologist, compares irrigated and nonirrigated cotton plants at the 24th annual East Alabama Cotton Tour, held Aug 29, which involved stops at several farms in Lee and Macon counties.)

Today, the biggest concerns for most cotton producers are water availability and finding ways to stay competitive in an increasingly global market.

Lee County producer Harry Lazenby is all too familiar with both challenges. A 40-year veteran of farming, Lazenby remembers the high tide of farming, between the 1960s and 1980s, when moisture was readily available and prices were high.

"From 1960 to about 1980, we never thought about making a bale of cotton," Lazenby recalls. "We always got water. But by about 1980, we started the downturn and noticed the results."

"Looking back, we never knew how good we had it – and prices were good too."

As any producer will attest, if you don’t have adequate moisture, you can’t raise cotton. They also know that their chances of staying competitive in an increasingly global market will involve reducing the cost of farming even further.

Lee County Extension coordinator Dr. Jeffrey Clary, who organizes the annual tour, was determined to address both these issues at this year’s event.

One of the stops along this year’s tour was a visit to the farm of Mitchell Lazenby, Harry’s son.

Last year, Mitchell installed a subsurface drip irrigation system that uses water pumped from a nearby lake located about 1,500 feet away. Auburn University researchers are conducting several experiments with drip irrigation at different locations throughout Alabama as a potentially reliable and inexpensive water source for the state’s row-crop producers. Use of this technology, which is still new to most Alabama row-crop farmers, already is standard practice out West.

"There are places in this country in Texas and Arizona where they’ve been running this kind of irrigation for years," says Larry Curtis, an Extension biosystems engineer who has established drop-irrigation experiments throughout the state.

One other cutting-edge technology explored at this year’s tour was precision farming, a technique that could have as great an impact on farming as mechanization did in the early part of the last century.

Producers were introduced to the lightbar, a guidance system used in tandem with a network of orbiting satellites, that has been shown to be especially useful in helping them reduce costly chemical overlaps during applications of burn-down herbicides just before harvest. In fact, using these lightbars has enabled producers to reduce these overlaps from several feet to only a few inches, according to Dr. Paul Mask, an Extension agronomist who coordinates the Alabama Cooperative Extension System’s precision-farming program.

Producers were also shown how handheld computers – such as the iPAQ, manufactured by Compaq -- can be used as scouting/treatment guides in the field. Dr. Hendrik van Riessen, who is doing post-doctoral work with Mask, demonstrated one such guide that he especially developed for cotton producers.

Equipped with such readily accessible scouting/treatment guides, producers would be in a far better position to identify and possibly even treat pests before they caused significant crop damage, van Riessen says. He believes guides also could be developed to troubleshoot other problems, such as foliar diseases and nematode infestations.

"One of the things we’ve tried to do with these cotton tours is stay on the cutting edge," Clary says.

"Right now, staying competitive is the big item on the farmer’s agenda – that and having enough water and learning to manage it wisely," he adds.

Even so, while the concerns of farmers have changed from year to year, one thing has remained constant: their passion for fellowship.

"More than 50 percent of the value of these tours is getting farmers together and sharing information and understanding what each other is doing. This approach has allowed us to transfer a lot of information over the past 25 years."

More than 80 people from eight counties attended this year’s tour, held August 29, which covered several farms in Lee and Macon counties.