Texas cotton is struggling to keep up with economic pressures, but new funding might help

In Odem, Texas, outside Corpus Christi, Jon Whatley and his crew are gearing up to start harvesting corn. In a few weeks, it’ll be cotton.

Whatley owns J&K Whatley Farms, and his cotton fields are about 80% done blooming. In the last stages of its life, a cotton flower turns shades of white, pink and red.

“So, one day white, three days red, and then dead. So it’s gettin’ close, gettin’ close,” Whatley said.

Whatley, who has been a farmer for 32 years, is worried about the future of agriculture. It’s been hard to turn a profit on cotton in the last few years.

“I mean, I’m scared, I really am,” Whatley said. “I have a young son that has graduated from college that’s on the farm, and I’m scared. He doesn’t have any equity to put into a farm. I’m scared how the next generation farmer survives this.”

In Texas, cotton has always been king. The state produces the largest amount of cotton in the U.S., which is about 40% of the world’s cotton. But in recent years, drought conditions have gotten worse, and the cost for things like equipment and fertilizers has risen. That has cut into profitability.

At the same time, the cost per pound of cotton has dropped from between 80 and 85 cents, at its recent height, to below 70 cents.

The recent changes in tariff and trade policies imposed by the Trump administration, along with a longtime decline in demand for cotton, all mean rural farms are struggling to turn a profit.

John Robinson, a professor of agriculture economics at Texas A&M University, said that retaliatory tariffs from China on American goods have created a lot of economic uncertainty, especially in the agriculture sector.

“It makes people uncertain, so they don’t buy as much in those markets,” he said. “And I think it contributes to slower economic growth.”

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Cotton’s also been facing competition from other fabrics, like the polyester found in popular athletic wear. The industry has been trying to create cotton-polyester blends to keep up with trends, but it hasn’t been easy.

“The marketing strategy is to try to get cotton in the blend so that, as we sell more and more and more apparel, at least there’s some percentage of it that’s cotton,” Robinson said. “But from a competition and a marketing standpoint, man-made fiber has been a huge concern for cotton going back to the 1970s and ’60s … And it’s an ongoing challenge.”

Whatley has seen more and more gins closing in South Texas in particular.

“That’s a cut in workforce, that’s a cut at rural economy, and it’s a backwards effect of lack of cotton demand, the pressures from microfibers … and the drought, you know, and nobody can control the drought,” he said.

Whatley and others around the state are hopeful about this year’s cotton harvest. For starters, there’s been a good mix of rain and sunshine in the Coastal Bend.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller says that harvest is looking on the upside.

“I’m driving through South Texas and down here the cotton is, I mean, it’s as good as I’ve seen it in a long time,” Miller said. “This year looks much more promising than the last two or three years, I’ll say that. The cotton gins may actually get to open up this year.”

Trump’s landmark spending legislation, referred to as the Big Beautiful Bill, will free up money for farmers who have experienced natural disasters and falling crop prices.

Kody Bessent, the CEO of Plains Cotton Growers in Lubbock, said the Title 1 section of the bill will help bring stability in the agriculture business.

“It helps provide some stability in the event if we see price declines like we’ve seen more readily. So it helps provide support in that arena,” Bessent said. “It provides some more readily available and more robust risk management programs through crop insurance.”

Earlier this year, Congress also freed up about $10 billion for farmers to compensate for the declines they saw during the 2024 crop year.

“So it’s helping keep people afloat,” Bessent said. “It’s not making them profitable, but it’s keeping them in business. And so that way we can continue to produce a robust crop, provided Mother Nature plays ball with us, and hopefully keep people from going out of business. And that’s the ultimate goal.”

Whatley is hopeful that all the help from federal programs will allow him and other small farmers to keep money flowing through their communities.

“We don’t need help when things are going successfully, but when it’s like this, we need the federal government to come in and be a partner of ours and understand that … it’s important to have small American farms – it’s important to have big American farms as long as they’re family owned, and have them out here because of what we do for the rural community,” he said.

In his experience, if the farms aren’t doing well, their communities aren’t, either.

“It’s all my suppliers; it’s all the people that work with me; it’s the people I hire; it’s the trucking; it’s the tire shop; it’s the school districts, the roads,” he said. “All those things are financed by the farm. And as the farm is in a struggle, that’s going to continue to deteriorate the equity in rural America, which is the part that worries me the most.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated to add clarity on why cotton farmers are seeing lower profits.

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