By Signe Brewster
Across 1,000 acres of cotton plants in Arkansas, Tyler McClendon is running an experiment.
The seeds are the same, as are his company Oxbow Agriculture’s methods of growing them. But just ahead of planting the cotton seeds in April, Oxbow coated them with a special microbe not usually found in its cotton plants. Their presence is expected to increase McClendon’s cotton yield by about 10 percent.