Determination of Optimum Data Sets to Employ for Choosing Cotton Cultivars

Cotton growers often base their cultivar selection upon relative performance of cultivars from the previous year at a site that is most similar to their production field. However, climatic differences may contribute to greater year-to-year variation at one site than site-to-site variation in the Mid-south region. Consequently, year by cultivar interactions may exceed site by cultivar interactions. Thus, relative performance of cultivars at one site in one year may not be the best predictor of relative performance at the same site the following year. Lint yields from the Arkansas Cotton Variety Tests by location for 2005 through 2008 were evaluate to determine the relative values of previous one and two years of data by and over locations for predicting yields of a cultivar at a specific site.