Cotton Farming in the United States (NAICS 111920)
An investor's primer for a general audience. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 111920 covers U.S. farms whose primary business is growing cotton — both upland cotton and the finer, longer-fiber American Pima, also called extra-long staple (ELS).
1. Overview
Cotton farming is the seasonal, asset-intensive business of growing a harvestable plant fiber (lint) plus its byproduct seed. It sits at the very start of a long chain that runs cotton → gin → yarn → fabric → clothing and home textiles, and it ends at the "farm gate" — the point of first sale, where the grower hands the crop off to a gin, merchant, cooperative, or contract buyer.[4] Because farmers sell a raw commodity whose price is set on a global exchange, their economics look like those of any commodity producer: revenue is roughly yield × price, and profit is whatever survives input, land, harvest, and financing costs. Most of the crop is exported, which makes the industry unusually exposed to overseas mill demand, trade policy, and the dollar.[1]
Why an outside investor should care: cotton is a liquid, exchange-traded soft commodity with its own price cycle, and the farms behind it own real, income-producing land and water rights. But one fact shapes everything below — there is essentially no large, liquid, pure-play publicly traded U.S. cotton-farming company. The industry is thousands of mostly private, family-owned farms.
- Public-market routes are almost all indirect: farmland real-estate investment trusts (REITs) that lease ground to cotton growers; the seed, fertilizer, chemical, and equipment companies that sell to them; the processors and merchants downstream; and cotton-futures products for pure price exposure. The one thinly traded near-direct exception is discussed in §4.
- Private-market routes are the direct ones: owning or leasing farmland, operating a farm, financing a crop, or investing through private farmland or agribusiness funds.
The near-term backdrop is a soft market. USDA's (U.S. Department of Agriculture) July 2026 forecast projected a modest balance for the 2026/27 marketing year — see §10 — but cotton remains a cyclical commodity, not a secular-growth industry, and weather, Brazilian supply, synthetic fibers, and trade policy can overwhelm any favorable forecast.[10]
2. What it is and how it's structured
In scope (111920): establishments primarily engaged in growing cotton. Roughly 97% of U.S. output is upland cotton; about 3% is Pima/ELS, grown mainly in California and the arid Southwest under irrigation.[1]
Adjacent activities that are explicitly excluded — an investor should not conflate these with the farm:
- Cotton ginning — NAICS 115111. Ginning (separating lint from seed and baling it) is a support activity for crop production, not farming. It is a distinct, heavily consolidated business (see §8).
- Soil preparation/planting — 115112; machine harvesting — 115113; other postharvest support — 115114. Custom field services hired by farms.[4]
- Cottonseed crushing/oil milling — NAICS 311224 (oilseed processing).
- Raw-cotton merchant wholesaling — NAICS 424590.
- Textile mills and apparel — NAICS 313/314/315. Spinning cotton into yarn and making cloth and clothing is downstream manufacturing.
- Other field crops sit in sibling codes: sugarcane (111930), hay (111940), sugar beets (111991), all-other crops (111998).
The operating chain within the farm: seed and land prep → planting and crop protection → irrigation or rain-fed cultivation → defoliation and mechanical harvest → haul to gin → separation of lint, seed, and waste → marketing, storage, financing, and shipment to mills or exporters.[4] Land ownership, farm operation, ginning, and marketing are frequently handled by different entities.
Ownership mix: overwhelmingly private and family-based. Nationwide, roughly four in five U.S. farms are sole proprietorships or family partnerships/LLCs, and cotton is no exception — a blend of family operations and larger farming LLCs, plus institutional and absentee landowners who lease ground to operators. There are no cotton "chains" or franchises; scale comes from a single family or partnership farming more acres, often on rented land. That said, scale is where the value sits: USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) estimates that large-scale family farms generated about 65% of U.S. cotton production value in 2022.[17]
3. How big it is
Our ingested federal figure. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard for NAICS 111920 is $3.25 million in average annual receipts — a farm at or below that counts as a "small business."[2] This is an eligibility threshold, not an estimate of industry revenue. Because the average U.S. cotton operation sells only a few hundred thousand dollars of cotton a year, effectively the entire industry is "small business" by the federal definition.
A measurement caveat that matters here. The business datasets investors usually reach for — the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) and Nonemployer Statistics (NES) — exclude crop and animal production by design.[5][6] They count only certain employer or nonemployer businesses, and most farms report through the operator's household rather than as conventional payroll employers. For NAICS 111920 those sources show only a few thousand records — a severe undercount. The authoritative federal count of this industry is the USDA Census of Agriculture, taken every five years by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS).
From the 2022 Census of Agriculture (the most recent), USDA/NASS reports:[3]
- 7,724 farms classified primarily as cotton farms (NAICS 111920).
- 14,283 farms actually grew cotton (many field-crop farms grow cotton alongside corn, wheat, sorghum, or peanuts).
- Those farms harvested about 7.74 million acres and produced roughly 14.9 million bales (a bale is about 480 pounds of cleaned lint).[3][1]
- $6.54 billion — the market value of cotton and cottonseed sold in 2022, across 14,278 farms.
- ~35% of harvested acres were irrigated (about 2.68 million of 7.74 million acres); the rest was dryland, rain-fed.
The value is highly concentrated: the ~10,700 farms selling $50,000 or more of cotton and cottonseed accounted for about 99% of that $6.54 billion.[3] A relatively small number of larger operations grows most of the crop.
Recent operating scale. Output swings with weather and prices. USDA figures for the most recent crops:
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| 2025 planted area | 9.283 million acres (lowest since 2015/16)[7] |
| 2025 harvested area | 7.805 million acres[7] |
| 2025 yield | 856 pounds per harvested acre[7] |
| 2025 production | 13.918 million bales[7] |
| 2024 production | ~14.41 million bales (13.94M upland, 0.47M ELS) from 11.7M planted acres[8] |
| 2025 active cotton gins | 419 (downstream infrastructure, not farm count)[13] |
Low prices in 2024–25 pushed growers toward other crops, which is why 2025 planted area fell to a decade low even though the harvested crop held up on good yields.[7][9]
4. The investable universe
There is no large, liquid, major-exchange U.S. cotton-farming pure play. Public exposure is overwhelmingly indirect; the cleanest direct exposure is private (owning or leasing farmland). The table groups the practical options.
| Company / vehicle | Ticker | Type | Scale / note |
|---|---|---|---|
| J.G. Boswell Company | OTC: BWEL | Grower/processor | Rare near-direct listed exposure: grows Pima cotton in California and gins/markets it. Diversified agriculture, very thin liquidity, limited disclosure vs. large listed firms[21] |
| Farmland Partners | NYSE: FPI | Farmland REIT | ~71,600 acres; about 60% of portfolio by value in primary row crops including cotton — the more cotton-relevant REIT (landlord economics; cotton not separately reported)[18] |
| Gladstone Land | Nasdaq: LAND | Farmland REIT | 144 farms, 98,688 acres across 14 states; mostly specialty/permanent crops — current filings do not flag cotton as material[19] |
| Archer-Daniels-Midland | NYSE: ADM | Processor | Cottonseed processing (oil, meal, feed); expanded cottonseed JVs in 2025 — a large diversified agribusiness, not a cotton-farm bet[20] |
| Deere & Co. | NYSE: DE | Equipment | Dominant maker of cotton pickers/strippers, plus precision-ag gear[22] |
| CNH Industrial | NYSE: CNH | Equipment | Case IH cotton harvesters |
| AGCO | NYSE: AGCO | Equipment | Broad-line farm machinery |
| Corteva | NYSE: CTVA | Seed / crop protection | PhytoGen cottonseed and traits; herbicides/insecticides[23] |
| Bayer | OTC: BAYRY | Seed / crop protection | Deltapine — the leading U.S. cottonseed brand |
| BASF | OTC: BASFY | Seed / crop protection | FiberMax and Stoneville cottonseed |
| Nutrien / CF Industries / Mosaic / FMC | NTR / CF / MOS / FMC | Fertilizer & chemicals | Input suppliers to all row crops |
| iPath Series B Bloomberg Cotton Subindex ETN | NYSE Arca: BAL | Futures-linked note | Tracks ICE cotton futures — price exposure, not farm exposure |
| ICE Cotton No. 2 futures | CT | Commodity future | Global benchmark cotton price, quoted in U.S. cents per pound |
(REIT = real-estate investment trust; OTC = over-the-counter; JV = joint venture; ETN = exchange-traded note; ICE = Intercontinental Exchange.)
Major private and "other" participants:
- Grower-owned marketing cooperatives — Plains Cotton Cooperative Association (PCCA), Staplcotn, Calcot, and Carolinas Cotton Growers (together, the Amcot group) — originate and market as much as 40% of the U.S. crop on behalf of members.[16] They are member-owned institutions, not investable, and are not equivalent to private-equity owners of member farms.
- Global merchants buy, gin, warehouse, finance, ship, and hedge the crop: Cargill Cotton, Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC, private), and Olam Agri.[24][25] Olam Agri's U.S. business spans origination, trading, ginning, warehousing, and logistics; Olam Agri is now ~81.81% owned by the Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company (SALIC).[26] There is no U.S.-listed pure cotton merchant.
- Private farmland funds and family operators own or lease the actual growing ground. A reliable national ranking of private cotton-farm owners does not exist in federal business data and should not be inferred from it.
5. How the money works
Cotton is a price-cycle commodity business. A grower's gross revenue per acre is essentially:
(lint yield × lint price) + cottonseed byproduct value + eligible government/insurance payments
Lint price. The world reference is ICE Cotton No. 2 futures, quoted in cents per pound. Recent U.S. season-average farm prices show the cycle plainly: about 76 cents/lb for the 2023/24 marketing year (a marketing year, or MY, runs Aug–July), roughly 63 cents for 2024/25, and near 61 cents for 2025/26.[9] USDA's July 2026 outlook put the 2026/27 farm price around 73 cents.[10] Prices this soft sit near or below full-cost break-even for many growers — which is why 2025 acreage fell to a decade low.[7][9]
Yield and the irrigation split. Irrigated cotton yields far more than dryland — often more than double — but costs more to grow. About a third of U.S. acres are irrigated; the big dryland base (especially the Texas High Plains) means a single drought can wipe out a large share of the crop, as happened in Texas in 2022.[3][32]
Cottonseed — the coproduct that helps pay the gin. Every pound of lint comes with roughly 1.5 pounds of seed. Cottonseed is an economically useful coproduct sold into cattle feed, oil, and meal — not waste — and its value (often a few hundred dollars a ton) can offset a meaningful share of ginning and harvest cost.[34] That is why the census tracks "cotton and cottonseed" together.[3]
Costs. Cotton is input-intensive: patented seed with genetic traits, fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides, fuel, irrigation energy, repairs and machinery ownership, custom harvesting, hauling, storage, ginning, interest, and land rent. Because break-evens for many growers are near or above recent market prices, the federal safety net (§7) is not a side detail — it is central to whether a cotton year is profitable.
Marketing and basis. Growers rarely sell at the flat futures price. They market through cooperatives, pools, forward contracts with merchants, or futures/options — capturing or losing a local "basis" (the gap between futures and the local cash price) and taking on basis, margin, and counterparty risk. Cash flow is seasonal: producers spend heavily months before final crop proceeds arrive. The metrics that matter most are lint pounds per harvested acre, planted-to-harvested acreage (abandonment), realized price and quality premiums, cottonseed revenue, cost and gross margin per acre, working-capital and debt service, and crop-insurance/program receipts.
6. What drives demand
- Global textile and apparel demand. Cotton ultimately sells because mills — mostly in Asia — spin it into yarn for clothing and home goods. That demand tracks global consumer spending and economic growth. A U.S. grower can prosper even though domestic textile manufacturing is small, as long as export channels function.
- Exports dominate. The U.S. exports roughly 80% of the cotton it grows, and exports account for more than 85% of total demand for the U.S. crop.[1][11] In 2024, U.S. cotton exports were worth about $5 billion; major destinations include China, Vietnam, Pakistan, Turkey, and Bangladesh, with the ranking shifting year to year as Chinese purchases in particular swing with trade relations.[11] This export tilt makes the industry a leveraged bet on Asian mill demand and trade access.
- Competition from man-made fibers. Polyester and other synthetics now supply the majority of world fiber; cotton competes on price and on consumer preference for natural fibers. When oil (the polyester feedstock) is cheap, synthetics gain share.
- Quality-sensitive Pima/ELS demand and rising brand requirements for traceability and sustainability shape which cotton sells and at what premium.
- Global supply competition. The U.S. was the world's largest cotton exporter for about three decades but was overtaken by Brazil in 2023/24; in 2024/25 Brazil held roughly a 30.5% share of world exports versus about 25.8% for the U.S.[12] Brazil's low-cost expansion is a structural headwind for U.S. export prices.
7. Regulation
Cotton is one of the most policy-shaped crops in U.S. agriculture. The key regimes:
- The Farm Bill safety net. Under Title I (commodity programs), growers enroll "seed cotton" base acres in either Price Loss Coverage (PLC) or Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC), administered by USDA's Farm Service Agency (FSA). PLC pays when the market price falls below a statutory reference price.[27] In the 2025 reconciliation law — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed July 4, 2025 — the seed cotton reference price was raised from 36.7 to 42.0 cents per pound, starting with the 2025 crop, a meaningfully higher price floor.[28]
- Crop insurance, STAX and MCO. USDA's Risk Management Agency (RMA) runs subsidized federal crop insurance and the cotton-specific Stacked Income Protection Plan (STAX), an area-based revenue policy for upland growers; a Margin Coverage Option (MCO) is available in selected counties.[29] A grower who enrolls a farm's seed cotton in PLC/ARC generally cannot also buy STAX on that farm. A marketing-assistance loan also lets growers borrow against the crop at a set loan rate.
- Ad-hoc assistance. When markets fall hard, Congress adds one-off payments. For the 2024 crop, the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program (ECAP) paid cotton $84.74 per planted acre (initially 85% of that).[30]
- Classification and standards. USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) oversees cotton grading; cotton tendered against a U.S.-listed futures contract must be classed by USDA.[33]
- Pesticides and pests. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates the herbicides and insecticides cotton relies on (dicamba drift has been a recurring legal flashpoint). USDA and industry run the Boll Weevil Eradication Program, one of the most successful pest-control efforts on record — it sharply cut cotton pesticide use and lifted yields.[31]
- Water. Irrigation is governed by state water law. The Texas High Plains, which grows around a quarter of the U.S. crop, draws on the declining Ogallala Aquifer, and California Pima faces state groundwater limits — long-run constraints on where and how much cotton can be grown.[32]
- Labor and trade. Cotton is highly mechanized, so it uses far less hand labor (and the H-2A guest-worker program) than fruit or vegetables. Trade policy is central: a long-running World Trade Organization (WTO) case brought by Brazil forced changes to U.S. cotton subsidies in the 2010s, and today tariffs and import restrictions — such as U.S. curbs on Xinjiang-origin cotton goods under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) — reshape where cotton and cotton products flow.
8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation
The whole cotton chain is consolidating around scale:
- Fewer, larger farms. The number of U.S. farms keeps falling while average size rises; large-scale family farms already generate about 65% of cotton production value.[17] This is real economic concentration without a few corporations owning the sector.
- Gins. Active U.S. cotton gins have fallen from about 2,254 in 1980 to 419 in the 2025 season, as module-handling technology let growers haul cotton farther to bigger, more efficient gins; about 60% of 2025's active gins each processed more than 20,000 running bales.[14][13] Ginning is more concentrated than farming because gins require expensive, location-specific equipment and steady seasonal throughput; many are grower-owned through cooperatives.
- Seed and traits — an oligopoly. Four firms — Bayer (Deltapine), Corteva (PhytoGen), BASF (FiberMax/Stoneville), and Syngenta — control an estimated 93.5% of the U.S. cottonseed-trait market, and Deltapine alone has been planted on roughly 37% of U.S. acres.[15] Genetics (herbicide tolerance, insect resistance, yield) are both a major cost and a major driver of farm productivity.
- Marketing. A handful of global merchants and the grower cooperatives (which market ~40% of the crop) dominate origination and export.[16]
Barriers to entry are high: land, water rights, expensive specialized equipment (a cotton picker can cost more than a house), and the working capital to carry a crop for a year. That favors established operators and well-capitalized landowners. Competitive edge comes from secure water and productive land, strong agronomy, modern harvest/gin assets, low-cost financing, and reliable access to merchants and export logistics.
9. Risks
- Price cyclicality. Cotton prices swing widely with global supply, mill demand, and speculative flows; soft prices in 2024–25 drove acreage to a decade low.[7]
- Weather and abandonment. Drought, heat, and storms (especially on the dryland Texas High Plains) can destroy a large share of the crop in a year. USDA's July 2026 outlook projected 2026/27 abandonment — planted acres not harvested — at 23.5%, up from about 16% for the 2025 crop; aquifer depletion is a slow structural threat.[10][3][32]
- Export and trade exposure. With ~80% of the crop exported, U.S. cotton lives and dies on foreign demand, tariffs, sanctions, and the dollar; Chinese buying in particular can make or break a season.[11]
- Structural competition. Brazil's low-cost expansion and the long secular rise of synthetic fibers both pressure long-run cotton demand and price.[12]
- Input and interest-rate squeeze. Seed, fertilizer, chemical, fuel, machinery, land-rent, and working-capital costs can rise faster than lint prices, compressing already-thin margins.
- Water risk. Irrigation dependence and tightening groundwater rules can impair both yields and land values.
- Policy dependence. Much of the industry's profitability in weak years comes from federal programs and ad-hoc aid; changes to the Farm Bill safety net directly move farm income.
- Biological, quality, and logistics risk. Herbicide-resistant weeds and insect resistance to seed traits raise costs; contamination, grading discounts, gin access, or transport bottlenecks cut realized prices.
- Financial and liquidity risk. Highly leveraged farms — and thinly traded public or private vehicles like BWEL — can be hard to refinance or exit.
10. How to invest, and the outlook
Public-market routes (almost all indirect):
- Near-direct listed exposure is limited to J.G. Boswell (BWEL), a thinly traded, diversified California grower/processor — the closest thing to a listed cotton farm, but with real liquidity and disclosure limits.[21]
- Farmland REITs — chiefly Farmland Partners (FPI), which leases row-crop ground including cotton — offer land ownership and rent income with stock-market liquidity, but no REIT is a cotton pure play and rents are diversified across crops.[18][19]
- Input, equipment and processing stocks — Deere, CNH, AGCO (machinery); Corteva, Bayer, BASF (seed/chemicals); Nutrien, CF, Mosaic, FMC (fertilizer/chemicals); ADM (cottonseed processing) — are "picks-and-shovels" exposure to acreage and farm spending, not to the cotton price directly.
- Cotton price exposure — ICE cotton futures (CT) or the futures-linked ETN (BAL) — is a direct bet on lint prices, with the usual roll and leverage risks of commodity products, and carries no farmland or dividend.
Private-market routes (the direct ones):
- Owning or leasing cotton farmland (rent income plus land appreciation), operating a farm directly (full commodity-producer risk/return), providing secured operating credit, or committing to a private farmland/agribusiness fund. These offer the genuine "own the industry" exposure that public markets don't. Due diligence should center on yield history and abandonment by farm, water security and lease terms, realized cotton and cottonseed prices, input/machinery costs, crop-insurance coverage, debt maturities and working-capital lines, gin access and marketing contracts, and succession/liquidity plans.
Reported outlook. USDA's July 2026 forecast projected the 2026/27 U.S. balance at roughly 13.7 million bales of production against 13.9 million bales of use, with about 12.3 million bales of exports, 4.1 million bales of ending stocks (a ~29.5% stocks-to-use ratio), and a season-average farm price near 73 cents/lb.[10] That setup is modestly constructive for efficient producers but not a growth story.
What to watch (forward-looking): the ICE cotton futures price and its break-even gap; U.S. export demand, especially from China and Vietnam; Brazil's harvest and export pace; weather in Texas and the Southeast; the dollar; and the newly raised 42-cent seed-cotton reference price plus any further ad-hoc aid, which together firm the income floor for 2025 and beyond.[7][10][28] The likely shape of the coming years: a smaller, leaner U.S. cotton footprint leaning harder on the federal safety net and high-yield genetics, competing against a fast-growing Brazil and against synthetic fibers — with farmland and the input/equipment/processing complex, rather than any cotton-farm stock, remaining the practical way for most outside capital to participate.
Sources
- USDA Economic Research Service, Cotton and Wool — Cotton Sector at a Glance, 2024/2025. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/cotton-and-wool/cotton-sector-at-a-glance
- U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (13 CFR 121.201), effective March 17, 2023 (ingested ground truth: NAICS 111920 = $3.25 million average annual receipts). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
- USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2022 Census of Agriculture, Volume 1, Chapter 1 (United States) — cotton farms, acreage, value of cotton and cottonseed sold, irrigation, and concentration by sales class, 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/
- U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Manual — definition of 111920 and adjacent codes (115111–115114, 311224, 424590). https://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
- U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns — Methodology (excludes crop and animal production). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
- U.S. Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics — FAQ (excludes crop production). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics/about/faq.html
- USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Crop Production 2025 Summary (2025 planted/harvested acres, yield, production; 2025 the lowest planted area since 2015/16). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/cropan26.pdf
- National Cotton Council / Cotton Grower, Final 2024 USDA Crop Estimates (~14.41 million bales; 13.94M upland, 0.47M ELS). https://www.cotton.org/news/releases/2025/2024cropest.cfm
- USDA Economic Research Service, Cotton and Wool Outlook — season-average farm-price series (2023/24 ~76¢, 2024/25 ~63¢, 2025/26 ~61¢). https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/cotton-and-wool/
- USDA Economic Research Service, Cotton and Wool Outlook: July 2026 — 2026/27 balance sheet (production, use, exports, ending stocks, stocks-to-use, ~73¢ farm price) and 23.5% projected abandonment. https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/115080
- USDA Foreign Agricultural Service / ERS, U.S. Cotton Exports and Destinations (exports >85% of demand; ~$5B in 2024; China, Vietnam, Pakistan, Turkey, Bangladesh). https://www.fas.usda.gov/commodities/cotton
- USDA ERS / Fibre2Fashion, Brazil tops global cotton exports (~30.5% share, 2024/25) vs. U.S. ~25.8%. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/
- USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Cotton Ginnings 2025 Summary (419 active gins; ~60% processing >20,000 running bales). https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/n583xt96p
- Cotton Grower, Ginning Report: Strength in Smaller Numbers (about 2,254 active gins in 1980, long-run decline). https://www.cottongrower.com/cotton-production/ginning/ginning-report-strength-in-smaller-numbers/
- SeedWorld / USDA, USDA Details Market Shares of Biggest Seed Industry Players (top-4 firms ~93.5% of cottonseed-trait market; Deltapine ~37% of acres), 2023. https://www.seedworld.com/us/2023/10/04/usda-details-market-shares-of-biggest-seed-industry-players/
- Plains Cotton Cooperative Association, Amcot: The Voice of American Cotton Growers (cooperatives market ~40% of the U.S. crop). https://pcca.com/article/amcot-the-voice-of-american-cotton-growers/
- USDA Economic Research Service, Large-Scale Family Farms Lead in Value of Production for Many Commodities in 2022 (cotton ~65% of value from large-scale family farms), 2024. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/108249
- Farmland Partners Inc., Form 10-K for FY2025 (SEC) — ~71,600 acres; ~60% of portfolio value in primary crops including cotton. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1591670/000110465926017533/fpi-20251231x10k.htm
- Gladstone Land Corporation, Form 10-K for FY2025 (SEC) — 144 farms, 98,688 acres across 14 states. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1495240/000149524026000007/land-20251231.htm
- Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, Form 10-K for FY2025 (SEC) — cottonseed processing and 2025 cottonseed JVs. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/7084/000000708426000011/adm-20251231.htm
- J.G. Boswell Company, Company Overview, and OTC Markets, BWEL Profile (California Pima grower/processor). https://jgboswell.com/; https://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/BWEL/profile
- Deere & Company, Cotton Harvesting Equipment. https://www.deere.com/en/harvesting/cotton/
- Corteva Agriscience, Seeds and Traits (PhytoGen cottonseed). https://www.corteva.com/us/products-and-solutions/seeds-and-traits.html
- Cargill, Cargill Cotton. https://www.cargill.com/agriculture/cotton
- Louis Dreyfus Company, Cotton. https://www.ldc.com/us/en/who-we-are/business-lines/cotton/
- Olam Agri, United States Operations and About Us (~81.81% owned by SALIC). https://www.olamagri.com/locations/usa; https://www.olamagri.com/about-us
- USDA Farm Service Agency, Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) — seed cotton a covered commodity. https://www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/income-support/arc-plc
- American Farm Bureau Federation, One Big Beautiful Bill Act: Final Agricultural Provisions (seed cotton reference price raised 36.7 → 42.0 ¢/lb), 2025. https://www.fb.org/market-intel/one-big-beautiful-bill-act-final-agricultural-provisions
- USDA Risk Management Agency, Stacked Income Protection Plan (STAX) and Margin Coverage Option (MCO). https://www.rma.usda.gov/policy-procedure/insurance-plans; https://www.rma.usda.gov/margin-coverage-option
- American Farm Bureau Federation, Emergency Commodity Assistance Program (ECAP): What You Need to Know (cotton $84.74/planted acre), 2025. https://www.fb.org/market-intel/emergency-commodity-assistance-program-ecap-what-you-need-to-know
- National Cotton Council, Boll Weevil Eradication Program. https://www.cotton.org/tech/pest/bollweevil/
- Texas A&M / ScienceDirect, Cotton production, irrigation, and the Ogallala Aquifer in the Texas High Plains (~25% of U.S. crop; irrigated vs. dryland economics), 2021. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378377421006636
- USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, Cotton and Tobacco — Rules and Regulations (cotton classing/standards). https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/cotton-and-tobacco
- USDA Economic Research Service, Characteristics and Production Costs of U.S. Cotton Farms (cottonseed as coproduct; farm cost structure). https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=42824