The U.S. Agriculture Department’s crop planting forecast projects Georgia’s producers will plant 1.45 million acres of cotton this year, an increase of 9 percent.

That is 120,000 addition acres, but Richey Seaton, executive director of the Georgia Cotton Commission, said he expected the forecast to include more.

“I was a bit surprised,” Seaton said. “I thought it would be a little bit higher than that, somewhere probably a million and a half to 1.55 million, somewhere in there.”

World cotton supply is tight and prices are high right now, Seaton said.

“We’re looking at some record prices for cotton right now, but cotton prices have not been that high over the last, say, 5-10 year period,” he said.

Nationally, cotton acreage is forecast to grow 14 percent.

Georgia’s cotton crop forecast is second only to Texas, where farmers will plant 6 million acres of cotton, according to the USDA report.

Tags: U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA, Georgia cotton, cotton crop, cotton forecast, crop forecast, Georgia Cotton Commission