From cotton to grass: A farmer's sustainable transformation

How converting cotton fields healed soil and built carbon.

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Published on May 8, 2023

Todd Boykin grew up raising cotton with his father on their farm near Childress, Texas. Later, he worked as a lawyer, but his father's retirement deepened his involvement in the farm. Along with it came an eye for soil.

Like so many other cotton farms in their community, the Boykins' land was wear-ing out. "My dad was a great farmer," says Boykin, "but after more than 100 years of growing cotton, the land was deteriorating. It had been cottoned to death. Cotton is a long-stemmed crop that produces very little residue after harvest. After years of growing cotton, the soil was blowing and washing, like a lot of other cotton farmers' fields."

Cotton Alternative

As an alternative to cotton, Boykin began to think about growing grass and regeneratively grazing cattle. On other ranches, he'd seen how this combination could transform land. "I believed the fields would be more productive in the long term seeded to grass," he says.

Starting with his father's land and with some adjacent 160-acre tracts he purchased that had formerly grown cotton, Boykin seeded the land to grass and fenced it for managed grazing. With grass growing and cattle rotating through the tracts, the soil soon began to heal.

"I can really see the difference in the land," Boykin says. "It's becoming more productive, and the soil isn't blowing or washing away."

The most dramatic evidence of change resulting from converting land to grass came in the years soon after the conversion. There was a big rain followed by strong wind.

"We were standing in a large tract of grass, and beside it — despite the fact that it had just rained — the neighbor's cotton ground was blowing a huge cloud of dust across the field onto our grass. But where we were standing, no soil at all was moving. It was really a stark contrast and the first definite sign we were on the right track."

Since those early years, Boykin has continued to buy tracts of land when they come up for sale, converting them to grass for managed grazing by cattle. Over the past 12 years, he has converted to grass some 5,000 acres of land that was previously farmland or that was land previously enrolled in the USDA Conservation Reserve Program.

The profitability of grazing cattle on converted ground runs neck and neck with growing cotton, he says, mainly because there are fewer annual operating inputs in the grass system after the infrastructure is in place for fencing and water developments.

"There's a huge difference in input costs between the two systems," Boykin says. "I just have one old John Deere tractor now and some minor equipment. When we were growing cotton, we had a bunch of tractors and a lot of expense for fuel and fertilizers."

The grazing system does incur some feed inputs for cattle — protein supplements in winter and hay in that rare year when drought limits grazing cattle on stockpiled grass over winter.

The Greater Reward

While Boykin has found that converting old cotton ground to grass can indeed pay off financially, the greater rewards perhaps lie in the ability of managed grazing to restore soil health. Increases in soil organic matter signal the restoration.

"In fields that have been in grass for five or six years, the organic matter has more than doubled," he says. "On land that had grown cotton for 120 years, the organic matter was down to the 1% range in some cases. Now, it has increased to 2%."

After witnessing how a managed grazing system can boost soil organic matter, Boykin believes the next step will be eventual sales of carbon credits.

When converting land to grass, Boykin seeds a diverse mix of native grasses and forbs. On land coming out of cotton, he fall plants winter wheat before planting grass the following growing season.

Cattle in field — Courtesy of Todd Boykin

"We kill the wheat in the spring and plant the grass into the wheat residue with a grass drill," he says. "We need plants other than cotton stubble to hold the soil. Otherwise, it would just blow."

Rainfall and soil type determine when grass can be grazed. "If we get a good stand, we can graze a spring seeding lightly in the fall," Boykin says. "But our rainfall here is highly variable. Some of our grass seedings have taken four or five years to establish a really good stand."

Boykin builds permanent perimeter fencing around each 160-acre tract. One temporary cross fence cuts the tract in half to permit rotational grazing.

Water developments vary. In the main, wells, underground pipes, and a rural water system deliver water to pastures.

Boykin has self-financed some of the expense of both seed and infrastructure. He has also used some cost sharing available through the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP).

He typically stocks 80-acre paddocks with 200 cow-calf pairs and moves the cattle to new grass after three or four days.

"When we first started, we rotated three herds through the pastures," he says. "We have since combined the herds into one, and that has made it so much easier in terms of time and effort."

Evidence that Boykin's system of man-aged grazing produces resilient grass was most evident by late summer of 2022, when drought forced neighbors to sell cattle. "We've destocked by 25%, but many conventional grazers have had to sell three-quarters of their herd," he says.

Neighbors are starting to note the abundant grass growing on Boykin's side of the fence. He says: "One man said to me, 'You've got a lot of grass out there. How do you get that much grass?' That's encouraging to me, to have people look at the grass and see something improv-ing the land, land that's going to take care of us long into the future."