Virtually all of the state’s cotton crop has been planted and now producers are in a waiting game to see if weather conditions will dry out. Since the beginning of the year, Northeast Arkansas has been deluged with rains and it has impacted row crop planting significantly.
The city of Jonesboro has received more than 40 inches of rain this year, about 15 inches more than normal, and is approaching the yearly average of about 52 inches of rain, according to the National Weather Service.
One rain event in early April produced more than 10 inches of rain or more across the region, and the month is now one of the wettest on record, the NWS reported. The state averages 51.42 inches of rain per year.
The near-weekly rain events throughout the spring delayed many growers’ planting efforts while punishing those who managed to plant their cotton early, Zachary Treadway, extension cotton and peanut agronomist for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture said.
“Some stuff that got in early got a lot of water,” Treadway said. “Cotton, as a crop, does not like to have ‘wet feet,’ staying wet and sitting in water.”
Some growers will likely see a certain degree of plant stunting and other negative effects correlated with cotton roots subjected to excess water.
“I haven’t looked at a hard number, but I think we can count rain in feet, rather than inches this spring,” he said. “It almost feels like it’s rained about every other day.”
In its March 30 Prospective Planting Report, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated Arkansas growers would plant 580,000 acres of cotton in 2025. Treadway doesn’t think the actual harvest numbers will be in that range. Ruined plants are far more likely to be replanted with soybeans than cotton, and repeated weather delays have left many growers with the unappealing prospect of planting cotton well into the summer.
“There’s a lot of producers who just don’t like the taste of planting June cotton,” Treadway said. “I think we’ll see a lot of that cotton ground claimed on insurance as prevented planting, or swapped to something like soybeans, which have a slightly later window.”
According to data from the USDA, up to 20% of the state’s cotton crop had begun squaring (developing flower buds) by June 15, placing it just slightly behind the five-year average. Treadway said that all is not necessarily lost if the state can catch a break in the weather.
“I’ve seen some real pretty cotton that can handle the weather well,” he said. “If we could miss some rains and it could heat up some, we’ll be just fine and have the potential to make a very good crop this year.”
USDA has lowered its expectations for the 2025-26 U.S. cotton crop, however.
“Pointing to the excessive rain and planting delays in the Delta, harvested acreage was lowered 2% this month to 8.19 million acres,” said Scott Stiles, extension agricultural economics program associate for the Division of Agriculture.
“The national average yield for 2025-26 was reduced more than 1% from last month to 820 pounds per acre, also because of the conditions in the Delta,” he said. “As a result, the production forecast was reduced 500,000 bales to 14.0 million, below the 14.4 million bales produced in 2024-25 and the second smallest crop in the past decade.”
Relief from the rains might be on the way. The entire Arkansas Delta region has been under a heat advisory for the last several days and it hasn’t rained, according to NWS. The next significant chance of rain will come Sunday (June 29) and Monday.
