Tennessee ranks ninth in the list of top 10 states that grow cotton. Texas produces 42 percent of the country’s cotton. Second is Georgia at 18 percent. Rounding out the top 10 are Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee and California.

The Volunteer State produces 600,000 bales of cotton annually on 280,000 acres, valued at $192 million. The crop is grown in 19 counties in the western portion of Tennessee and seven counties in central Tennessee.

In Kentucky, cotton was grown in the far western part of the state for many years, though fewer and fewer are taking much interest in the crop. Most prefer to use the land to grow corn or soybeans.

In 2006, a handful of farmers returned to the crop, with nearly 3,000 acres planted in Fulton County in Kentucky.

“Cotton was grown here for years and years, but it went out in the 1970s,” said Cam Kenimer, an ag research specialist at University of Kentucky. “At that time many were still picking it by hand, and what automated pickers were available were very primitive.”

Prices and yields dropped on cotton in the 1970s, while corn and soybean production skyrocketed. Farmers throughout the state abandoned cotton and began growing grains instead.

Not all farmers did. Philip Bosley, of Owensboro in Daviess County, has proven cotton is still found in western Kentucky. Bosley, 82, said the little cotton he produces never has been about financial gain, even when he was farming for a living.

“Other farmers would tease me, saying ‘Philip, you can’t make any money off that cotton.’ I said, ‘I know I can’t make any money off it, and I’m not trying to. I just don’t want it to disappear from the county.’”

Bosley’s father preferred tobacco, not cotton, adding that with tobacco one would reasonably know what they’re going to make.

Like all crops, the cotton Bosley now plants has been genetically modified so that it’s Roundup resistant to allow for the defoliant to be sprayed around the cotton bushes without harming them. And the boll weevil has been eradicated from the cotton fields as well.

“You don’t have to fertilize cotton much but to do it right, it’s very chemical intensive,” Bosley said.