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Alabama farmers plant corn, wheat instead of cottonDECATUR, Ala. (AP)--Many Alabama farmers are reducing the number of acres devoted to growing cotton, a move that could cause cotton gins and warehouses to close. Those closures could make it difficult to return to cotton farming, said Charles Burmester, an agronomist at the Tennessee Valley Research and Extension Center in Limestone County. Many farmers have switched to corn, wheat and soybeans because of the high cost of planting cotton. Rotating crops can help improve soil quality and produce better yields. "The rotations are going to help everybody, but we do need to keep cotton in that mix," Burmester told The Decatur Daily. Alabama's highest cotton yield in the past decade was 920,000 bales in 2001. Production has declined steadily since then, with Alabama cotton farmers producing about 416,000 bales last year. Larkin Martin, a cotton producer from Courtland, told the Daily she designated about 35 percent of her fields for cotton this year, compared with 45 percent last year. She said she replaced some of the cotton with wheat that can be harvested this month, and she'll follow that with soybeans to get two harvests. "It's putting a strain on cotton gins--there is no question about that," she said. "If this trend toward non-cotton crops continues, I suspect closing and consolidation in gins." But Martin said cotton could be revived later. Thirty years ago, she said, grain facilities closed when farmers replaced grain with soybeans. "In the '70s, when soybeans had huge acreage in our area, those acres left," she said. "Grain storage facilities went away over the decades. Now, there is a resurgence in grain storage construction." She said most gins should survive if the shift away from cotton doesn't last more than a couple of years. 7/21/08 Date: 7/15/08
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