Calendar Rules for Planting. A Risk:Reward analysis
4-10-2026
There is a lot going on in the field and we are experiencing a weather pattern that is helpful for staying caught up. We are somewhat behind on total rainfall and are expecting another dry week into the middle of April.
The rare condition is the temperature increase that will develop into mid-April, offering us June-like conditions. This is going to create a question of early planting for cotton and peanuts. We have a guideline when looking at the calendar for not planting until the first warm period after April 20th, but I’m not aware of any hard research that makes that a fact.
We will begin running the planting forecast next week so you can see what the weather conditions guideline shows, and it's going to be excellent at least for a period prior to April 20. I am sure some operations will start, because I know of 2 that always start in the first half of April even when it's cold. And planting prior to April 20 might be successful in 2026.
HOWEVER, warm weather is not the whole story. I see a few risks planting cotton before April 20 that do not have an offsetting reward (yield). The risks are linked to extremely early blooming. Mid-April planting could produce mid-June blooming.
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It looks like June blooms create knotty irregular bolls and are generally the most affected by hardlock.
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The shortest night of the year is June 21 this year. Night time is the recovery time during stress. If June is dry, early planted cotton has the longest period of stress (day-length) coupled with the least time of recovery (night) so it will prematurely cut out more compared to the same amount of drought in July or August blooms.
We Never know when drought is coming, but we do know when the longest days are. We can wait out this week and still have a long window for successful planting.
In Summary
Based on the CALENDAR: My input is that if we can plant your cotton between April 25 and May 25th, we are in the sweet spot. Plus we have a week of cushion on either side. The extended planting window is April 20 to June 5. Outside of this, in my opinion, you are adding Risk without an offsetting reward.
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