Upland Cotton

Upland cotton is grown as a warm-season annual, needing more than 180 frost-free days to mature its fiber. It thrives in full sun on well-drained soils, including those with moderate salinity, and forms a multi-branched subshrub that can reach five to six feet tall by midsummer, with separate branches producing its flowers and bolls.

Sowing: Seed should be soaked for 24 hours before planting, sown about 3/8 inch deep in tamped, mulched beds, and kept above 77°F to germinate, a process that can take two to six weeks.

The boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis), believed native primarily to southern Mexico, has historically been the crop's most consequential pest, first detected in Texas in 1892 and later found on wild cotton plants in Florida in 1932. Its host range extends beyond cultivated cotton to other mallow-family genera such as Hibiscus and Thespesia, which let it persist even where commercial fields had been cleared.

Cotton is harvested once the boll — a rounded green capsule that ripens to brown — cracks open, exposing the long and short fibers packed around roughly three dozen seeds inside.

Fiber: Upland cotton is grown chiefly for its fiber, which supplies about 90 percent of the world's cotton and around 95 percent of cotton production in the United States.

Culinary: Its seeds are pressed for cottonseed oil used in margarine and other cooking products, and the seeds themselves can be eaten once cooked to remove the natural toxin gossypol.

Cultural: The Zuni people have used the plant to make ceremonial garments and twisted its fuzz into cords for ceremonial use, and the plant has also figured in herbal medicine traditions.

Upland cotton arose some 5 to 10 million years ago when a wild Mexican cotton species hybridized with the African species Gossypium herbaceum, giving rise to today's polyploid species. Genetic surveys point to the Yucatán Peninsula as the center of its original wild diversity, while archaeological remains from the Tehuacán Valley in Mexico document its cultivation by about 3500 BC, the earliest known evidence of cotton growing in the Americas.