About the project

Dear Cotton Grower:

The Georgia Cotton Commission has funded a research project designed to help Georgia cotton farmers improve their production efficiency. We are asking for your help in providing data for this project. Participation will involve filling out a questionnaire on various cotton inputs, farm qualities, and personal experience. The questionnaire could take from 10 to 45 minutes, depending on your level of record organization, and you can choose to not participate or stop participating at any time during the process.

If you agree to participate, you will be asked to provide specific information on your usage of inputs in cotton production (seed, chemicals, equipment hours, acres planted, etc.). After your data is input online, we will use that data to estimate the efficiency of all participating Georgia cotton farmers. When the results are ready, you will receive an email notifying you so that you can log back into this website and retrieve your results. You can expect the results sometime in the fall of 2017. All individual data will be kept anonymous to others; when you view results, only your own information will be identified, all other farmers will be represented simply as data points.

In exchange for your help in providing us with data, we will provide you with all our results. You will be able to log back into this website and see how your farm compares to other cotton farms in Georgia in terms of production efficiency. We hope the results will even allow us to give you specific feedback about usage levels of specific inputs you might want to adjust. These results will be in tables and graphs that make clear how you stack up to other cotton growers in Georgia and hopefully will allow all Georgia cotton farmers to learn where and how they can improve their efficiency and profitability. Again, your results will only be identified for you; other Georgia farmers will be anonymous dots on graphs or ranges of results in tables when farmers log into the site.

We thank you in advance for helping us complete this project successfully. We believe that together we can do something of great benefit to Georgia’s cotton farmers.