VIDALIA — A local agriculture expert expects cotton planting will decline in Concordia Parish in the next agricultural year.

“For the first time in Concordia Parish we might just have a couple of thousands of acres because of pricing,” Concordia Parish Extension Service Director Glen Daniels said.

However, Daniels said he expects to see an increase in soybean acreage for the 2009 season.

That is partly because costs associated with growing crops have gone up, especially fertilizer.

“It doesn’t take any fertilizer to grow soybeans,” Daniels said. “You can grow soybeans in Concordia (Parish) because of the rich soil.”

It is for similar reasons — the high price of fertilizer coupled with the low price of wheat — that Daniels said he believes that only 2,000 to 3,000 acres of wheat will be planted.

“A lot of the farmers are tenant farmers,” he said. “It’s hard to invest that heavily into a property when it is not their own.”

But farmers are hoping for a better year next year than the one they are wrapping up, in which producers were socked by flooding in the early season, a lack of rain from the mid-to-late portions of the growing cycle and Hurricane Gustav.

“We were going into harvest suffering from drought, where in some places you had only one rain from April until August,” Daniels said. “The beans were burned up and the cotton was stressed — the hurricane made a bad situation worse.”

But local farmers are looking forward to the next year, he said.

“One thing about farmers is they can bounce back,” Daniels said. “Farmers are a group of people more positive in things than a lot of other people — even if it was a bad year, they can say, ‘Well, there’s next year.’”