A cotton boll in a dry dusty field. Image from Adobe Firefly, 2025.
Dilemmas atop headaches and an unsympathetic Mother Nature created a crisis for the West Texas cotton industry – long considered king of the local economy.
The king is feeling the pain.
“In my 45-year farming career, this is the worst year we’ve ever experienced. The Texas cotton industry is bleeding out,” Travis Mires, president of Plains Cotton Growers (PCG), testified in March at the Texas Capitol.
Cotton producers are in deep trouble because prices are low, and crop yields have been rough for the last three years.
The troubling numbers:
- Cost to produce the current cotton crop range from 68 to 97 cents per pound, according to the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension analyzed the current crop year for break-even prices in Texas.
- Cotton is selling for 66 cents per pound at the time of this article.
- Typically, 42 West Texas counties produce about 3.7 million bales of cotton. That’s dropped to less than half.
Exacerbating the issue is no new federal farm bill, though state legislators in Austin are trying to help through House Bill 43 (more about that below).
If Texas has a bad year and yields drop, production costs on a per pound basis go up – driving losses even higher.
The Mires family has been farming for more than 100 years in Lynn and Dawson counties. He’d like that to continue.
“I’m afraid though if conditions stay the way they are for the last three crop years my sixth-generation grandchildren may not be able to preserve that blessed legacy,” Mires said. “The last three years have had a devastating effect on the cotton industry specifically in Texas.”
Steve Olson, a farmer from Plainview, spoke to the Texas House Agriculture & Livestock Committee on April 1 in favor of legislation to help farmers.
“Recently I was driving through Brownfield, Texas which is a small town southwest of Lubbock, Texas with a good friend of mine who is from the Dalhart area. And he made a comment. He said, ‘Man, these cotton towns are just drying up,’” Olson said.
“One of the most heartbreaking stories that I can tell you – there’s a young man from Lockney, Texas – fourth generation farm family – graduate of Texas Tech. All he ever wanted to do his whole life was farm. He made it three years. He’s now working for a dairy,” Olson said.
Historically, 25 percent or more of Lubbock’s economy has been driven by agriculture and cotton is the biggest share of it.
Why it matters
LubbockLights.com reached out to Kody Bessent, the CEO of PCG, who said cotton impacts everyone in Lubbock.
As one example, Bessent mentioned a restaurant owner.
“That gentleman I talked to here several years ago, he said, ‘I don’t have to understand all the intricacies from farm to fork or how my apparel is made. But I do understand very abruptly when the ag economy is doing very well because that increases my receipts in my restaurant.’ But when it’s not, he said, ‘I have a big damper,’” Bessent said.
“When the ag industry as a whole does very well, there’s a lot more economic driving impact to the local economies. There’s more disposable income to spend in that restaurant or at grocery stores or retail stores for apparel purchase – things of that nature,” Bessent said.
What happened to make things so bad?
“Mother Nature is just simply not cooperating or playing ball if you will. We’ve seen record losses from the Texas ag industry as a whole, cotton being very significant to the area,” Bessent said.
Those previously mentioned 42 counties will usually produce 3.7 million bales, about 55 to 60 percent of all the cotton production in Texas, he said. At current prices, that much cotton would bring in a little under $1.2 billion.
But in more recent years, drought and high winds cut production drastically.
“We’ve only been averaging about 1.3 to 1.5 million bales,” Bessent said.
Turning back to Olson’s testimony, he said, “For the ‘22 crop year, Texas farmers were forced to abandon roughly 49 percent of the crop.”
For 2023 and 2024 he said it was 33 and 34 percent, respectively.
Some of the yearly costs remain the same whether a farm produces a million bales or zero bales.
Cotton gins, warehouses, merchants and many others are hurt too when there’s no cotton.
Mires told lawmakers, “Fifty percent of the cotton gins that were in operation in 1998 have closed their doors, and once the gin closes, it’s closed for good. This is a major concern for us as producers as we may not have the infrastructure for when we do make a good crop which will lead to producers missing out on profitable market prices.”
Cotton producers and other ag businesses need support from the state and federal government, Mires said.
“I hate to paint such a bleak picture but there’s no way around it. … Cotton is the number-one commodity cash crop in this great state and our local economies depend on us to stay in business,” Mire said.
What about tariffs?
Neither Plains Cotton Growers nor Plains Cotton Cooperative Association wanted to talk about tariffs. But Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller did in a recent interview with WFAA-TV.
“I tell you what concerns us more than the tariffs is not having a farm bill for two years. That’s really got them strung out,” Miller said.
President Trump announced countless tariffs since taking office in January. He also delayed or withdrawn many of them. Notably, China is the largest customer of American cotton and the White House announced last week even tougher sanctions are possible.
“China faces up to a 245 percent tariff on imports to the United States as a result of its retaliatory actions,” the announcement said.
In the first Trump term, he announced $28 billion of help for farmers who were hurt by tariffs with China. The money was paid for by those very same tariffs according to a previous White House announcement.
“They’ve been down that road. The last time we did it, farmers ended up great,” Miller said.
House Bill 43
The Texas House is considering a bill to help Texas agriculture as a whole, not just cotton.
“Texas led the nation in agricultural losses related to weather in 2024 at over $3.4 billion, with drought and excessive heat contributing to more than 66 percent of Texas’ losses,” said the official legislative analysis of House Bill 43.
The bill author, Stan Kitzman (R-Pattison), representative for District 85, told the Agriculture & Livestock Committee these issues and inflation put Texas agriculture at risk.
If passed in its current form, the bill would:
- Allow the Texas Agricultural Finance Authority to make loan guarantees of up to $5 million instead of $2 million.
- Remove age restrictions for farmers in the state’s interest rate reduction program.
- Change the young farmer grant program to an agriculture grant program and the grant match would be 10 percent instead of 50.
- Grants would be capped at $500,000 instead of $20,000.
- Have a provision for disease and pest control.
The bill’s fiscal note said the exact impact cannot be known until loans and grants are applied for.
“It is assumed that any costs associated with the bill could be absorbed using existing resources,” the fiscal note also said.
The bill provides immediate assistance and buys time for long-term solutions, Bessent said.
The nation has been without a farm bill – just using extensions of previous legislation for two years. The latest extension expires in September and more than one observer has said a new farm bill is urgently needed.
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