Annual Rainfall and Dryland Cotton Lint Yield—Southern High Plains of Texas

Agriculture in the Texas High Plains (THP) is in a transition phase of producing crops with a diminishing supply of irrigation-water from the Ogallala aquifer to dryland production systems. This shift is driven by the fact that the depth to the water table of the Ogallala aquifer continues to increase. Dryland cotton production systems are prevalent in the southern counties of the THP and our purpose was to use the long-term dryland cotton lint yields from these counties as precursors of the future cotton production patterns that will emerge in this region. For this purpose, from 1972 to 2018, we calculated the ratio of dryland cotton lint yield per unit of annual rainfall at the county level. This ratio is called crop water productivity (CWP) and has units of mass per unit volume (g/m3). In our analysis, we used cotton lint yield data provided by the National Agricultural Statistics and rainfall data provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Our results indicated that the three datasets used in our analysis, i.e., cotton lint yield, rainfall and CWP were all normally distributed. In this time period, 1972 to 2018, only one year 2011—a year with a record drought of 179 mm of rain failed to produce a dryland cotton crop in all the counties used in our analysis. The mean cotton lint yield ± standard deviation ranged from a high of 400 ± 175 kg/ha in Lubbock County to a low of 252 ± 144 kg/ha in Andrews County. However, the counties with the largest CWP > 90 g/m3 were Glasscock, Midland and Martin County. The importance of this result is that these counties are in the southern region of the THP and are subject to extreme environmental conditions and yet cotton producers manage to produce a cotton crop in most years. We conclude that management production methods used by these dryland producers represent the future schemes that will need to be adopted in other counties to sustain the emerging dryland cropping systems across the THP.

Active Management of Plant Canopy Temperature as a Tool for Modifying Plant Metabolic Activity

The relationship between a plant and its thermal environment is a major determiner of its growth and development. Since plants grow and develop within continuously variable thermal environments, they are subjected to continuous thermal variation over their life cycle. Transpiration serves to uncouple the temperature of the plant from that of its environment in a manner that reduces the occurrence of high temperature stresses that can limit plant performance. In some agriculturally important plants, there are desirable metabolic outcomes that are associated with specific stress events (e.g. wine grapes). In these plants it is often desirable to induce temperature and water stresses of known magnitude and duration at specific points in the growing season. In this study we used a computer-controlled irrigation system that used cotton canopy temperature to control irrigation in greenhouse-grown plants over a 10-day period. The system was designed to irrigate in a manner that altered the canopy temperature relative to specific temperature thresholds (28°C, 30°C, 32°C and 34°C). The results demonstrate that automated irrigation management based on canopy temperature is capable of altering the temporal pattern of canopy temperature in a desired manner using a feed-back loop. Potential limitations on this action are related to the range of air temperatures, radiation and humidity within the environment.

Continuously Monitored Canopy Temperature as a Proxy for Plant Water Status

Water deficits are major limiters of crop yield worldwide. The detection of water deficits can be difficult. Measurements of the aerial and soil environment are often used to infer the water status and detect water deficits. Since crop yield accumulates incrementally and cumulatively over seasonal time scales, continuous direct monitoring of the water status of the crop may provide needed insight into plant/environment interactions. Canopy temperature can be measured near continuously on seasonal scales in the field. Cotton was grown under 11 irrigation regimes in 2009 and 2010 with water deficits from 26% to 86% of crop evapotranspiration. Yield varied accordingly from ~500 kg·ha-1 to ~2600 kg·ha-1. Canopy temperature was measured on a 15-minute interval for ~65 days in each year. Yield was described by a linear function of total water (irrigation + rain) for each year with similar slopes and different intercepts. When canopy temperature was used as a surrogate for total water, yield was linearly related to daytime leaf-to-air VPD, mean seasonal canopy temperature, mean seasonal daytime canopy temperature, and cumulative seasonal daytime canopy temperature. Limiting the analysis to daytime periods improved the ability to account for yield variation. Mean daytime seasonal canopy temperature and cumulative seasonal daytime temperature were most effective in accounting for yield variation across the seasons with a single regression line for both years.

Evaluation of a Metabolic Cotton Seedling Emergence Model

A model for cotton seedling emergence (MaGi) based on malate synthase kinetics was evaluated. Cotton seeds were planted through the early spring and into typical planting times for the areas. Soil temperatures at seed depth were used as inputs into MaGi and a commonly used seedling emergence model based on heat unit accumulation (DD60). Time to 50% emergence was calculated and compared with predicted emergence using MaGi and DD60. MaGi yielded predictive capability without the need to resort to lengthy experimentation required by traditional methods. The results suggest that a physiological or semi-empirical approach incorporating both enzyme kinetics and whole plant temperature responses would be useful for rapidly constructing seedling emergence models.

Measurement of Cotton Transpiration

There are a few field methods available to directly measure water evapotranspiration (ET) along with its two components, evaporation from the soil (E) and from the crop (T). One such technique that measures T, uses sensors to calculate the sap flow (F) of water through the plant stem and is based on the conservation of mass and energy, i.e., the stem heat balance method. This instrument consists of a flexible heater that is wrapped around the plant stem with temperature sensors to measure the difference in temperature of F below and above the heater. This is a null method, where all inputs and outputs are known and the calculated F is a direct measure of T. This method has been used to measure T in a variety of crops, including cotton, grapes, olive trees, soybean, ornamental and horticultural crops. A new version of the EXO-SkinTM is the Stem Gauge Dual Channel Design (SGDCTM), which was commercially introduced and had a radically new design resulting in a different energy balance, compared to the original design, which needed experimental verification. An initial evaluation was done with potted cotton (Gossypium hirsutum, L.) plants in a greenhouse experiment showing that values of cotton-T measured with the new sensor were accurate;however, this comparison was limited to daily T T in the 2 - 7 mm/d range, representative of the semiarid Texas High Plains. For this purpose, cotton was planted on 12 June 2017 on a 1000 m2 plot in a soil classified in the Amarillo series at the facilities of the USDA-ARS, Lubbock, TX. For a period of 15 days, 2 to 16 Sep 2017, we measured hourly cotton-T with the new sensors and with portable growth chambers (0.75 m × 1 m cross-section, and 1 m height) where water vapor flux was measured at a 10 Hz frequency using an infrared gas analyzer. We used three chambers and, in each chamber, the new sensors were installed on four cotton plants. We used linear regression analysis to compare hourly and daily values of cotton-T measured with the sap flow gauges against T measured by the chambers. Using a t-test (p T for a wide range of environmental conditions.