LAMESA, Texas_They call it sorry cotton.
The yellowed, scrawny crop is what Matt Farmer and his son-in-law Garron Morgan say they have too much of this year.
"We've got a lot more sorry cotton than we've got good cotton," Garron, 38, said over the roar of the tractors pushing through the fields. Together, the pair farm about 10,000 acres, growing mostly cotton and some peanuts on their West Texas farm about an hour south of Lubbock.
Today was harvest day, typically Matt's favorite day. He watched as the machines glided across the horizon, raking the cotton balls from their stalks until nearly as clean as a Popsicle stick.
Those little balls of fluff are what he counts on to pay his employees, cover his bills, buy his wife and grandchildren nice Christmas presents. A couple dozen families are counting on him, too. In addition to his family's land, he rents farmland from them.
But on this chilly November afternoon, he shook his head. They were weeks behind.
And now, that field was just a bunch of sorry cotton.
Cotton is Texas' No. 1 cash crop, with a value of $3.4 billion last year. More than half of the state's cotton is produced in the southern high plains area where Matt and Garron live.
Here, highways criss cross seemingly never-ending farmland with panoramic views that magnify the sky's vastness. A cluster of whining wind turbines and the occasional solar farm nod to the changing times.
Farmers like Matt and Garron are the men and women_the people you don't know that run the farms you don't see_who grow the fiber that make your shirts and your jeans, and even is in the dollar bill you hand to the cashier for a pack of gum.
And this year, growing the cotton Texans depend on was a struggle.
The rain the farmers desperately needed and anxiously waited for in the summer after the seeds were in the ground didn't come until September and October_too late to grow a tall cotton crop and just in time to soak the fields and delay the harvest.
"A lot of times, you can work your hardest, do whatever you can do with your own hands, but Mother Nature will play a bigger role in whether you make a good crop or don't make a crop at all," Garron said.
The farmers here don't blame climate change, President Donald Trump or his trade war for their difficult year. They say they're at nature's mercy, and they hate it.
But what concerns Matt more is the bare acres of farmland he passes on the way to his cotton fields_patches where farmers typically would be growing cotton but instead aren't growing any crop, hoping for better luck next year.
About one-fifth of the region's farmland didn't grow a crop this year because of the unfavorable weather conditions, according to the Plains Cotton Growers, a nonprofit that represents cotton farmers in the state's High Plains area.
Matt doesn't blame his neighboring farmers for the empty fields; he has some acres sitting empty, too.
"There's land laying blank out here right now that's not being farmed. And a lot of people say, 'Well, I'm not involved in agriculture, that doesn't affect me. I'm not going to worry about it," Matt said. Then he added, "If you eat, you're involved in agriculture. If you're not walking around naked, you're involved in agriculture."
Matt and Garron know they won't make a profit this year; they're aiming for broke_enough money to pay back their loans to the bank and their suppliers.
They just want to keep the farm going.
"We pray a lot," Matt said. "And I'm on blood pressure medicines."
Born to the life
As a kid, Matt wanted to be a cowboy, not a farmer.
He didn't like the feel of the dust clinging to his sweaty face or the bugs buzzing about while driving an open air tractor.
"I came home one day, and there was a new tractor in the barn that had a heater, an air conditioner and an AM radio in it," said Matt, a third-generation cotton farmer. "And I decided that the saddle that didn't have a radio or heater or air conditioner wasn't for me anymore."
When he and his wife, Dianne, married at age 17, a tractor and 640 acres of dirt in Borden County was all he wanted. Now, he's farming the land that's been in his wife's family for four generations.
"There is such joy knowing that this is what my family has done for years," said Dianne, as she searched for matching tupperware to pack up a workday lunch of roast, mashed potatoes and black-eyed peas. When her grandparents died, she and her cousins each inherited 320 acres, some of which Matt now oversees.
"They were such hard workers, and I know that they would be so pleased with what Matt's done," she said.
"I don't know about that," Matt said, chuckling.
As his childhood friends grew up and left the farm for college and later jobs in the professional world, Matt planted cotton in their place. About 85 percent of Matt and Garron's farmland is rented, including thousands of acres that belong to friends and family.
That responsibility weighs on him.
"That's a lot of acres, a lot of people depending on us to make them a living," said Matt, who wears a black cowboy hat and slim sunglasses to shade his face from the afternoon sun. Always armed with a joke, sometimes he cups his hand over his lip when he's thinking, below the salt-and-pepper mustache he's worn for decades.
He watched on a chilly Wednesday afternoon as tractors harvested that patch of "sorry cotton" on land six families entrusted to him and Garron. It hurts him to pull out a crop that isn't his best.
"The better I do, they better they can do," he said.
Choosing the life
Six years ago, Garron left a salaried job selling seed and fertilizer for a supply company to farm with Matt.
The soft-spoken farmer with a beard and a baseball hat_instead of a cowboy hat like his father-in-law_wasn't from a farm family, but he grew up working on farms and for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's research farm while a college student at Texas Tech University.
"There are lots of kids who grow up on the farm and leave as quick as they can. And there's lots of people like me who didn't grow up on a farm and come into it later in life."
He chose the unpredictabilities of farming over a job with a steady paycheck. Like Matt, he wanted to raise his son and daughter on the farm. He wanted to work with his family and for himself, not someone else.
"I knew cotton farming in West Texas, I wasn't going to get rich doing it," he said that November day as morning sunlight filtered through a stained glass window hanging of a cotton plant in his in-law's kitchen.
"But just the thrill of getting to plant a seed and watch what happens and seeing at the end of the year what you have left to harvest was something that always intrigued me."
The average age of a Texas farmer is 60, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's most current 2012 Census of Agriculture report. But the country has seen a slight increase of about 2 percent from 2007 to 2012 in the number of farmers ages 25 to 34 years old, the census states.
"We need young blood to come in and continue on what a lot of these families started in the '40's and '50's out here in this area," Matt said. "Agriculture in this area, we're the lifeblood of the economy. As we go, so goes the area's economy out here."
Farming helped Matt raise a family and pay for his daughters to attend college_something he and his wife didn't have the opportunity to do.
But he admits it's tough to make a living as profit margins shrink and operation costs rise.
"You have to have a lot of luck. You have to have a lot of faith," he said.
Trying new methods
Cotton fields dot the highway like breadcrumbs all the way from Lamesa to Spearman, four hours to the north. A maroon Texas A&M University flag marks the spot in the arid, chilly Panhandle where Quentin Shieldknight and his dad, Fred Shieldknight, farm about 10,000 acres.
Meet the rookie cotton farmers.
On their acreage near Spearman_a small town that thrives on oil and gas, farming and a vast view _ 38-year-old Quentin worried about pulling those white puffs sprouting from the ground.
His in-laws hand-picked cotton in northern Collin County before suburban sprawl overtook the land. Because of early Panhandle freezes, Quentin vowed he'd never grow the crop.
But when the prices of corn and wheat crashed several years ago, Quentin and Fred took a chance. Science promised new varieties of the plant could withstand the cold. Cotton also relies on significantly less water than corn.
The crop has exploded in the area, with farms dusted in white going on for miles.
"Once we tried it, it took off for us," said Quentin, who graduated with a degree in agronomy, the science of plant and soil, from Texas A&M University in College Station.
A few years ago, Quentin and Fred bought their first fancy tractor for harvesting the cotton_it does the work that three of Matt and Garron's machines do. Quentin's older sister, Kelly Jack, even got proposed to in one of the family's cotton fields.
"Now, we're cotton farmers, I guess for life," Fred said.
But one year's success doesn't promise another. Last year, an immature crop brought in only enough to cover Quentin and Fred's operation expenses.
Quentin's wife, Kristin Shieldknight, said the uncertainty of farming doesn't sustain a family of five on one salary that is paying bills and saving for college.
"You could live, but there'd be no savings," said Kristin, a former teacher and now chief of innovation for Spearman ISD, as she shoveled fresh wood shavings into a pig pen. "I want [my kids] to go to college. I want to help pay for their college. ... And I don't think you can do that unless I work."
This year, they're more optimistic. They caught a few more summer showers than Matt and Garron did in Lamesa. And, unlike their friends to the south, most of their farmland is irrigated.
But rain_and about six inches of snow_also delayed cotton harvest in the Panhandle. The farmers weren't picking cotton on this November afternoon_one week before Thanksgiving.
Quentin worried about the acres of cotton covered in snow, pretty as it was.
"It makes me sick to my stomach when I walk onto those fields and the cotton is just sitting there," Quentin said. "That's dollars sitting there."
Gaylon Morgan, professor and state extension cotton specialist of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&m University, says climate change is making growing and harvesting cotton more challenging. While there's controversy about the cause of that climate change, Morgan said "something" is occurring that will impact what crops farmers grow and ultimately what people have to eat and wear.
"And it will probably make for more erratic crop production," he said, adding that more drought-tolerant crops are likely to be adopted over time, such as when Quentin switched to farming more cotton than corn because it takes about half the amount of water.
But Matt and Quentin, whose farms are located in different growing seasons, say the extreme weather this year_hot and dry to chilly and wet_is just cyclical.
"I know the weather changes. Other than the setting on a hair dryer, you tell me what normal is," Matt said.
They don't think Trump and his trade war is part of their tough times, either. Quentin said people forget Trump was a businessman, and didn't need to run for president.
"He's looking out to try to make good deals for the American people to get them more money in their pocket," he said.
Matt, who toured Sen. Ted Cruz around his farm last year, said if Trump "doesn't do something crazy, I'll probably vote for him again."
"He's trying," he said. "I'm not going to say everything he does is going to work, or even going to help. But it's nice to see somebody's got your back. You can get real discouraged out here."
Matt noted the farmland sitting bare, the solar plants and wind turbines farmers have allowed to overtake their land for extra money, and the meat goats his neighbor is raising on thousands of acres that once were cotton crop.
"Right now, if you don't have non-farm income, you're struggling," he said. "Some struggling pretty good, some trying to decide if they want to go again."
The cycle continues
Two weeks before Christmas, Matt harvested his last crop.
A snow in early December that normally would have fallen up north where Quentin farms hit his land instead, falling on what cotton was left.
It wasn't more sorry cotton, either. With tall stalks thick with white cotton puffs, it was a good patch. Not his best, he said, but pretty good.
That cotton had been ready to harvest since November, when the ground was too wet. He told Garron more than once they needed to get the crop out soon. Before the cotton balls fell to the muddy ground. Before they sat too long on the stalks, the burrs staining the white fluff yellow.
When the snow melted and dried from the fluff, they didn't wait any longer.
"We had one good day,'" he said in mid-December. "And the [farmers] that haven't gotten it done haven't had a good day since."
Matt and Garron will have enough money this year to pay back what they borrowed to grow the crop, but they won't make a profit.
It's better than Matt thought they'd fare.
He's looking ahead now to the next season, breaking and plowing the soil for a new crop.
And maybe next year, better luck.
"2019. Start praying," Matt said.
