LAMESA — They call it sorry cotton.

The yellowed, scrawny crop is what Matt Farmer and his son-in-law Garron Morgan say they have too much of this year.

"We've got a lot more sorry cotton than we've got good cotton," Garron, 38, said over the roar of the tractors pushing through the fields. Together, the pair farm about 10,000 acres, growing mostly cotton and some peanuts on their West Texas farm about an hour south of Lubbock.

Today was harvest day, typically Matt's favorite day. He watched as the machines glided across the horizon, raking the cotton balls from their stalks until nearly as clean as a Popsicle stick.

Those little balls of fluff are what he counts on to pay his employees, cover his bills, buy his wife and grandchildren nice Christmas presents. A couple of dozen families are counting on him, too. In addition to his family's land, he rents farmland from them.

But on this chilly November afternoon, he shook his head. They were weeks behind.

And now, that field was just a bunch of sorry cotton.

Matt Farmer reaches down to check some of his cotton in Lynn County, south of Lubbock. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

Cotton is Texas' No. 1 cash crop, with a value of $3.4 billion last year. More than half of the state's cotton is produced in the southern high plains area where Matt and Garron live.

Here, highways crisscross seemingly never-ending farmland with panoramic views that magnify the sky's vastness. A cluster of whining wind turbines and the occasional solar farm nod to the changing times.

Farmers like Matt and Garron are the men and women — the people you don't know who run the farms you don't see — who grow the fiber that makes your shirts and your jeans, and even is in the dollar bill you hand to the cashier for a pack of gum.

And this year, growing the cotton that Texans depend on has been a struggle.

The rain the farmers desperately needed and anxiously waited for in the summer after the seeds were in the ground didn't come until September and October — too late to grow a tall cotton crop and just in time to soak the fields and delay the harvest.

"A lot of times, you can work your hardest, do whatever you can do with your own hands, but Mother Nature will play a bigger role in whether you make a good crop or don't make a crop at all," Garron said.

The farmers here don't blame climate change, President Donald Trump or his trade war for their difficult year. They say they're at nature's mercy, and they hate it.

But what concerns Matt more are the bare acres of farmland he passes on the way to his cotton fields — patches where farmers typically would be growing cotton but instead aren't growing any crop, hoping for better luck next year.

Matt Farmer (right) talks with his son-in-law Garron Morgan while workers harvest their cotton in Lynn County south of Lubbock. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

About one-fifth of the region's farmland didn't grow a crop this year because of the unfavorable weather conditions, according to the Plains Cotton Growers, a nonprofit that represents cotton farmers in the state's High Plains area.

Matt doesn't blame his neighboring farmers for the empty fields; he has some acres sitting empty, too.

"There's land laying blank out here right now that's not being farmed. And a lot of people say, 'Well, I'm not involved in agriculture; that doesn't affect me. I'm not going to worry about it,'" Matt said. Then he added, "If you eat, you're involved in agriculture. If you're not walking around naked, you're involved in agriculture."

Matt and Garron know they won't make a profit this year. They're aiming for broke — enough money to pay back their loans to the bank and their suppliers.

They just want to keep the farm going.

"We pray a lot," Matt said. "And I'm on blood pressure medicines."

Charles Johnson pulls a tarp over a bale of cotton during the harvest at Matt Farmer's farm in Lynn County. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

Born to the life

As a kid, Matt wanted to be a cowboy, not a farmer.

He didn't like the feel of the dust clinging to his sweaty face or the bugs buzzing about while driving an open-air tractor.

"I came home one day, and there was a new tractor in the barn that had a heater, an air conditioner and an AM radio in it," said Matt, a third-generation cotton farmer. "And I decided that the saddle that didn't have a radio or heater or air conditioner wasn't for me anymore."

When he and his wife, Dianne, married at age 17, a tractor and 640 acres of dirt in Borden County was all he wanted. Now, he's farming the land that's been in his wife's family for four generations.

Matt Farmer kisses his wife, Dianne, after lunch at their home in Lamesa. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

"There is such joy knowing that this is what my family has done for years," said Dianne, as she searched for matching tupperware to pack up a workday lunch of roast, mashed potatoes and black-eyed peas. When her grandparents died, she and her cousins each inherited 320 acres, some of which Matt now oversees.

"They were such hard workers, and I know that they would be so pleased with what Matt's done," she said.

"I don't know about that," Matt said, chuckling.

As his childhood friends grew up and left the farm for college and later jobs in the professional world, Matt planted cotton in their place. About 85 percent of Matt and Garron's farmland is rented, including thousands of acres that belong to friends and family.

That responsibility weighs on him.

"That's a lot of acres, a lot of people depending on us to make them a living," said Matt, who wears a black cowboy hat and slim sunglasses to shade his face from the afternoon sun. Always armed with a joke, he sometimes cups his hand over his lip when he's thinking, below the salt-and-pepper mustache he's worn for decades.

He watched on a chilly Wednesday afternoon as tractors harvested that patch of "sorry cotton" on land six families entrusted to him and Garron. It hurts him to pull out a crop that isn't his best.

"The better I do, they better they can do," Matt said.

Choosing the life

Six years ago, Garron left a salaried job selling seed and fertilizer for a supply company to farm with Matt.

The soft-spoken farmer with a beard and a baseball hat — instead of a cowboy hat like his father-in-law — wasn't from a farm family. But Garron grew up working on farms and for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's research farm while a student at Texas Tech University.

"There are lots of kids who grow up on the farm and leave as quick as they can," he said. "And there's lots of people like me who didn't grow up on a farm and come into it later in life."

Garron chose the unpredictabilities of farming over a job with a steady paycheck. Like Matt, he wanted to raise his son and daughter on the farm. He wanted to work with his family and for himself, not someone else.

"I knew cotton farming in West Texas, I wasn't going to get rich doing it," Garron said that November day as morning sunlight filtered through a stained glass window hanging of a cotton plant in his in-laws' kitchen.

"But just the thrill of getting to plant a seed and watch what happens and seeing at the end of the year what you have left to harvest was something that always intrigued me."

Cotton flows through a gin at Woolam Gin in O'Donnell in West Texas. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

1 / 3Cotton seeds fall through a gin at Woolam Gin.(Rose Baca / Staff Photographer) 2 / 3Eliazar Gutierrez watchs a bale of cotton come out of the gin ready for packaging at Woolam Gin. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer) 3 / 3Bales of cotton are packaged at Woolam Gin. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

The average age of a Texas farmer is 60, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's most current 2012 Census of Agriculture report. But the country has seen a slight increase of about 2 percent from 2007 to 2012 in the number of farmers ages 25 to 34, the census shows.

"We need young blood to come in and continue on what a lot of these families started in the '40s and '50s out here in this area," Matt said. "Agriculture in this area, we're the lifeblood of the economy. As we go, so goes the area's economy."

Farming helped Matt raise a family and pay for his daughters to attend college — something he and his wife didn't have the opportunity to do.

But he admits it's tough to make a living as profit margins shrink and operating costs rise.

"You have to have a lot of luck. You have to have a lot of faith," he said.

Trying new methods

Cotton fields dot the highway like breadcrumbs all the way from Lamesa to Spearman, four hours to the north. A maroon Texas A&M University flag marks the spot in the arid, chilly Panhandle where Quentin Shieldknight and his dad, Fred Shieldknight, farm about 10,000 acres.

Meet the rookie cotton farmers.

On their acreage near Spearman — a small town that thrives on oil and gas, farming and a vast view — 38-year-old Quentin worried about pulling those white puffs sprouting from the ground.

His in-laws hand-picked cotton in northern Collin County before suburban sprawl overtook the land. Because of early Panhandle freezes, Quentin vowed he'd never grow the crop.

But when the prices of corn and wheat crashed several years ago, Quentin and Fred took a chance. Science promised that new varieties of the plant could withstand the cold. Cotton also relies on significantly less water than corn does.

The crop has exploded in the area, with farms dusted in white going on for miles.

A field of cotton was ready to be harvested last month near Spearman, north of Amarillo. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

"Once we tried it, it took off for us," said Quentin, who graduated with a degree in agronomy, the science of plants and soil, from Texas A&M University in College Station.

A few years ago, Quentin and Fred bought their first fancy tractor for harvesting the cotton — it does the work that three of Matt and Garron's machines do. Quentin's older sister, Kelly Jack, even got proposed to in one of the family's cotton fields.

"Now, we're cotton farmers, I guess for life," Fred said.

But one year's success doesn't promise another. Last year, an immature crop brought in only enough to cover Quentin and Fred's operating expenses.

Quentin's wife, Kristin Shieldknight, said the uncertainty of farming doesn't sustain a family of five on one salary that is paying bills and saving for college.

"You could live, but there'd be no savings," said Kristin, a former teacher and now chief of innovation for Spearman ISD, as she shoveled fresh wood shavings into a pig pen. "I want [my kids] to go to college. I want to help pay for their college. ... And I don't think you can do that unless I work."

The Shieldknight family: Fred (clockwise from top left), son Quentin, Quentin's wife Kristin, and their daughter Hayden, 7. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

This year, they're more optimistic. They caught a few more summer showers than Matt and Garron did in Lamesa. And, unlike their friends to the south, most of their farmland is irrigated.

But rain — and about 6 inches of snow — also delayed the cotton harvest in the Panhandle. The farmers weren't picking cotton on this November afternoon, one week before Thanksgiving.

Quentin worried about the acres of cotton covered in snow, pretty as it was.

"It makes me sick to my stomach when I walk onto those fields and the cotton is just sitting there," Quentin said. "That's dollars sitting there."

Gaylon Morgan, a professor and state extension cotton specialist of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M, says climate change is making growing and harvesting cotton more challenging. While there's controversy about the cause of that climate change, Morgan said "something" is occurring that will affect what crops farmers grow and, ultimately, what people have to eat and wear.

"And it will probably make for more erratic crop production," he said, adding that more drought-tolerant crops are likely to be adopted over time, such as when Quentin switched to farming more cotton than corn because it takes about half the amount of water.

But Matt and Quentin, whose farms are in different growing seasons, say the extreme weather this year — hot and dry to chilly and wet — is just cyclical.

"I know the weather changes. Other than the setting on a hair dryer, you tell me what normal is," Matt said.

Hector Cortez tends to cotton gins at Adobe Walls Gin, the world's largest gin under one roof, in Spearman, north of Amarillo. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

1 / 3Cotton is placed on a truck after being baled at Adobe Walls Gin, the world's largest gin under one roof, in Spearman.(Rose Baca / Staff Photographer) 2 / 3Silvano Morales tends to cotton coming through a gin at Adobe Walls Gin. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer) 3 / 3A seed house covers a pile of cottonseed at the Adobe Walls Gin, the world's largest gin under one roof, in Spearman, north of Amarillo.(Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

They don't think Trump and his trade war is part of their tough times, either. Quentin said people forget Trump was a businessman and didn't need to run for president.

"He's looking out to try to make good deals for the American people to get them more money in their pocket," he said.

Matt, who toured Sen. Ted Cruz around his farm last year, said that if Trump "doesn't do something crazy, I'll probably vote for him again."

"He's trying," he said. "I'm not going to say everything he does is going to work, or even going to help. But it's nice to see somebody's got your back. You can get real discouraged out here."

Matt noted the farmland sitting bare, the solar plants and wind turbines that farmers have allowed to overtake their land for extra money, and the meat goats his neighbor is raising on thousands of acres that once were cotton crop.

"Right now, if you don't have non-farm income, you're struggling," he said. "Some struggling pretty good, some trying to decide if they want to go again."

The cycle continues

Two weeks before Christmas, Matt harvested his last crop.

A snow in early December that normally would have fallen up north where Quentin farms hit Matt's land instead, falling on what cotton was left.

It wasn't more sorry cotton, either. With tall stalks thick with white cotton puffs, it was a good patch. Not his best, he said, but pretty good.

Cotton harvesters pick bolls from lines of cotton on Matt Farmer's farm in Lynn County south of Lubbock. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

Dew on a cotton plant on Matt Farmer's farm in Lynn County. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

That cotton had been ready to harvest since November, when the ground was too wet. He told Garron more than once that they needed to get the crop out soon. Before the cotton balls fell to the muddy ground. Before they sat too long on the stalks, the burrs staining the white fluff yellow.

When the snow melted and dried from the fluff, they didn't wait any longer.

"We had one good day,'" he said in mid-December. "And the [farmers] that haven't gotten it done haven't had a good day since."

Matt and Garron will have enough money this year to pay back what they borrowed to grow the crop, but they won't make a profit.

It's better than Matt thought they'd fare.

He's looking ahead now to the next season, breaking and plowing the soil for a new crop.

And maybe next year, better luck.

"2019. Start praying," Matt said.