Now for the Cotton Numbers
We provide the data for cotton acres and production
Now for the cotton story. Remember that PLC is based on cotton seed, not the lint.
List 1: Top 10 counties by cotton base acres
Nine of the top ten counties are in Texas, all of them clustered on the High Plains and South Plains around Lubbock. The lone outsider is Mississippi County, Arkansas, up in the Delta. Dawson County, Texas leads at 262,403 base acres. But cotton is a far smaller program than the grains — total U.S. seed cotton base runs about 10.8 million acres, roughly a fifth of soybeans and barely a tenth of corn. Watch the yields behind the Texas leaders, too: dryland West Texas counties like Dawson, Terry, and Lynn are enrolled around 1,070 to 1,135 pounds, while Hale (1,761) and Floyd (1,730) sit much higher on irrigation.
List 2: Top 10 counties by Total Cotton PLC Yield
Same productivity shuffle we keep seeing. Dawson, Texas had the most base acres in the country but drops to fifth here, because its 1,114-pound dryland yield can’t keep pace. Hale, Texas climbs from fourth to first on a 1,761-pound yield. And two newcomers crash the list on yield alone: Pinal County, Arizona vaults to fourth on just 96,905 base acres — barely a third of Dawson’s — because its irrigated desert yield is a staggering 3,450 pounds, and Dunklin County, Missouri arrives at seventh out of the Bootheel at 2,117 pounds. Productivity matters more for cotton than for any crop we’ve looked at, because the spread between dryland and irrigated yields is enormous.
List 3: Top 10 counties by cotton PLC yield per acre
New Mexico, California, and Arizona own this list. Chaves County, New Mexico tops it at 5,547 pounds per acre — five times what a dryland West Texas county posts — out of the irrigated Pecos Valley.
Here’s where cotton breaks from the grains, though. On the wheat and soybean per-acre lists, the leaders were mostly postage stamps. Cotton’s irrigated desert counties are the real thing. Pinal, Arizona delivers its 3,450-pound yield on 96,905 base acres — the same county that finished fourth on the total list — and Maricopa (46,940 acres), La Paz (18,049), and just outside the top ten, Fresno (21,226) and Kings (18,665) in California’s San Joaquin Valley, all pair desert yields with serious acreage. When you irrigate cotton in the Southwest, you get both. Pinal County showing up near the top of both the total list and the per-acre list is the clearest example in this whole series of a county that wins on volume and productivity at once.
And the standout storyline for your intro: cotton has the widest dryland-to-irrigated yield spread of any crop in the series. Pinal County, Arizona is the cleanest “wins on both” county you’ll find — fourth on total program pounds and fourth on per-acre yield, on nearly 97,000 base acres. If you want a single county to anchor the cotton post the way Walla Walla anchored wheat, Pinal is it.
Finally, we will provide the numbers for grain sorghum.