Brazilian soy farmers planting cotton during the interharvest will need to gather the biggest ever crop of the fibre with clockwork-like efficiency this year to avoid disrupting the harvests that will follow. Soy farmers usually plant corn in their soy fields once the oilseed crop has been gathered, but surging cotton prices, which have doubled in six months have persuaded many to switch to the lint for this year's interharvest period.
Output is set to leap 77 percent to 1.95 million tonnes from last year's 1.1 million bags as a result, as soy growers and farmers who grow only cotton, raise output. But some could struggle to harvest with limited machines to go round.
"With a large area planted, the worst problem - though I don't think it will happen - is that there wouldn't be enough machines," said Decio Tocantins, director of the cotton grower association of Mato Grosso, the top cotton and soy state.
"(Growers) will look for machines and cooperate with their neighbours to find a way," he said. Brazil is the world's No 1 exporter of soy, the biggest buyer of which is China while it has now climbed the ranks of cotton producers to fifth place. Soy futures have also risen about 40 percent in the nine months as part of a broad commodities boom.
Mato Grosso is expected to produce around half of Brazil's total cotton harvest, roughly doubling its output from last year. All of it must be picked by a September 15 deadline so fields are left free of vegetation for a set period - a law designed to break the life cycle of diseases that attack the crops.
But delays due to an unusually wet winter or time lost to mechanical breakdowns could at worst accumulate to delay sowing of some growers' next soy crops, and cause knock-on disruption to interharvest cotton farmers hope to plant again next year.
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