Mid-South growers tour Texas farms, gins and ag industry

Farmer Hunter Wilde, Lyford, Texas, right, peels back sugarcane stalk with a large knife for growers to see and taste the sweet plant. 

P.I.E. guests watch as cucumbers are sorted at the Pickle Shed, Hale Center, Texas. This plant will process an estimated 30 million cucumbers this year, according to Stephen Goetz, crop production manager for Best Maid Pickles, Hale Center.

P.I.E. tour guests pose along the steel wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Smith Gin Co-op employee Tyler Cross, visits with growers about the gin.

National Cotton Council's 2018 P.I.E. Class poses in front of a cotton stripper near Levelland. While mid-South growers harvest their cotton with pickers, for many of them this was their first time to see a cotton stripper in person. 

Mid-South growers tour Helena’s GateFront fertilizer terminal along the port of Corpus Christi. Helena built the terminal to allow the transport of products from other countries to meet the growing demand in the U.S. Terminal Manager Jeff Holley, center, led the tour. 

Denver Hance, quality assurance, Valley Co-op Mill, center, explains how the meat of the cotton seed, once separated from the hulls, is made into flakes, injected with steam and molded into pellets before it goes to the extraction plant. The Valley plant estimates it will receive 215,000 tons of cotton seed this year.

Growers walk the rows of stacked cotton bales in the Gulf Compress in Portland, Texas. In 2017, despite Hurricane Harvey, the Gulf Compress had a record year, handling 920,000 bales of cotton. 

Grower Glenn Wilde, left, shows P.I.E. growers sesame  in Lyford, Texas. 

A P.I.E. participant rides along in a cucumber harvester near Hale Center, Texas. The cucumbers harvested on this farm will be used to make Best Maid Pickles.

Tour guest observes South Plains cotton near Plainview, Texas.

Grower Brandon Rodgers visits with producers about drip irrigation. 

South Texas: Mid-South growers watch as the bale press compresses the cotton at EdCot Co-op Gin, Odem, Texas. 

Smith Gin Co-op manager Lee Tiller shows P.I.E. participants his gin's bale wrap process.  

Production Manager Calvin Sharp, at the Diamond Ethanol plant near Levelland, discusses the process of using grain sorghum in ethanol production. Sharp says they ran through 1.4 million bushels in about 30 days. At the Diamond plant they produce about 120,000 gallons of ethanol a day or 44 million per year.

EdCot Co-op Gin, Odem, Texas, demonstrates for P.I.E. growers how the plastic wrap is cut and carefully removed to prevent plastic contamination. Sid Brough manages the South Texas gin. 

Sinton, Texas, grower and P.I.E. alumni Bobby Rieder, right, welcomes Mid-South producers to Texas and the fish fry he held in their honor at his barn. Rieder's family prepared and served the wonderful meal. 

Hale County grower Kevin Belt, left, talks to producers about corn and cotton production on the High Plains. Rather than cut his corn for silage, Belt says he prefers to leave it for grain, due to the trash/stalks it leaves behind.

Mid-South growers visit a cotton farm in La Villa, Texas. 

Eighth-generation farmer Steve Newsom, right, tells growers he began growing grapes as an alternative crop due to the ground water declining. He also grows 4,000 acres of cotton and peaches, apples, peanuts, black-eyed peas and corn. 

Area Director Ben Robles, left, shows growers how the natural cotton fiber is tested and then classed at the USDA-AMS Cotton Division in Corpus Christi. More than 19,000 samples are processed per day at this coastal facility It is estimated this classing office will process nearly 2 million samples by season's end.