Cotton Seed Distributors - Web on Wednesday

With picking and ginning progressing well in the Macquarie Valley, three key cotton industry personnel provide a review of the season and results so far.

Kirrily Rorke
Cotton Industry Development Officer for NSW Agriculture funded by CRDC at Warren for the Macquarie Valley.

Kirrily, we’re just going to run through a bit of a season review on how the season has gone here in the Macquarie. Could you give us a bit of an overview on how it’s gone and what sort of problems we’ve encountered during the season?

Yes; we’re probably about 50% picked at this stage and still looking to see some of the results out of the gin and obviously picking is always the lie detector in the field to see what’s happening.

The season had a couple of fairly major glitches I suppose you could say; our water allocations were 19% at the start of the season around planting time and didn’t increase for the whole season so that was a fairly stressful start.

A lot of reduced plantings obviously; we ended up with about 30% of the valley planted and basically from then on people were hoping that even some of those crops were planted on slightly less water so we were hoping to get a little bit of increased allocation through the season and that didn’t happen either; we got no useful in season rain.

We ended up with a couple of major issues being water and temperature. We ended up with one of the hottest seasons, I think we were even hotter than Emerald at some point, so very abnormal and unwelcome some of the high temperatures that we did get.

You mentioned the high temperatures, I guess it could be described as two distinct heat waves; one in January and then one in March I think it was. Could you just run through those and what actually happened?

What we got in early January was about 6 days of heat up around the 40 degree marks, so very stressful for the cotton that was some time around early flowering coming up to peak flowering, so that’s going to have an impact on the number of seeds per boll and things like that.

We than had another heat wave in mid February, which was actually 18 days over 36 degrees and 8 of those in a row were over 40 and it was very, very unpleasant. The nights were very warm and I would think that the plant has shut down and that’s going to have had impact on especially the top half of the plant.

We’re probably doing a bit of theorising and extrapolating but we probably think that the January heats affected this early part of the plant here and the February heat at 18 days of consistent high temperatures you know it’s going to have an impact on a huge amount of the plant.

Just the final maturation of these bolls and right through the development of these upper bolls in the plant, so we’re actually seeing at picking a lot of issues in especially the top half of the plant that have been effected by a very large amount of heat.

And also at that time given the heat moisture stress and this is the time when crops were looking for their last irrigation and some of them didn’t have it; there were a couple of crops that were one to two irrigations short at the end of the season and those that did have to buy water at the end of the season were paying huge dollars per meg for temporary transfer so you are really going to see some high yields there to be able to cover those people’s costs, so the main issues are probably the temperature has had a huge effect on the plant, the water has had an effect on gross margin for things like the price that we’ve paid as well as the impact it’s going to have on yield and boll fill and it doesn’t look any good for next season either.

Yes it certainly isn’t. Just on the insect front, could you just run through the insect pressure during the season?

Yes, constant pressure and basically it was there. We didn’t have any of the huge numbers of egg layers like they did down at Hillston or over at Bourke but we did have constant numbers there. We did have with our egg collections and things, we did see reasonably low numbers of armigera the whole season so that was good in terms of control; products worked very well on the punctigera dominant populations, so that was a bonus. Bollgard seemed to work very well and only required one to two sprays for Mirids. I don’t think there were any heliothis sprays in the area on the Bollgard. Some of the Mirid sprays were SP’s so maybe they were touching up the helis but basically the Bollgard performed very well under the conditions.

And looking now to the end of the season. What percentage do you think we are through picking?

We’re probably about half way through and obviously we’ve had great weather for picking. We’ve had clear days and it’s been very warm up until now still. The season continues on this freaky warm stretch and we’ve had only the last probably three or four nights here in mid April to get under 12 degrees, so it’s quite bizarre.

You’re going to be running a couple of workshops on plough downs and pupae control. What are the key things that growers need to look for there as far as making sure that they’re doing the job properly? 

It all comes down to disturbance, especially the hill. The standard is 10cm across the top of the whole hill and the furrow and that’s impacted on things such as your soil tilth, obviously it’s very dry out there at the moment, so we’re going to have to look at things like soil structure and things like that but in the workshop we’re going to try and do two or three different operations and compare them and just get a handle on exactly what the soil is doing under these conditions with this amount of dryness that’s around.

Patrick Russell
Co-coordinator of grower services in the Macquarie Valley with Auscott Ltd.

Patrick, ginning has been going on for a little while now here at Warren. How is the ginning process going so far?

It’s going really well Craig. We’ve completed about 30% of our ginning for this season. Cotton started coming in a little bit slow but following from Easter on we’ve seen the cotton hitting the gin yard pretty regularly and the gins are going along really well. We’re seeing the quality of an excellent standard micronaire in that 4.2 range, length is an inch and an 8th, colour is just perfectly white, and you’d think it was just like a good snowy day. All in all it’s going really well.

Turnouts, any comments on turnouts so far?

Yes, we’re seeing them probably back a little bit and that’s probably back a little bit and that’s probably due to micronaire. Last year we saw the high micronaire so that meaning a greater weight in cotton fibre, so this year in the premium range in that 3.8 to 4.2 range for the micronaire, we’re just seeing the outturns just back a bit, but not back too far, their in that 38-39%.

So you said you’re about 30% through ginning this stage. When do you think you’ll be finished with a good run?

With a good run we’ll be finished in that second last week of May. We’re only working 6 days a week but we think we’ll be finished then.

Obviously a much shorter ginning season than in previous years. Are you able to do anything special in the gin to sort of help improve grower grades or anything?

Well this year with such a dry harvest we’re not using any heat in the gins and the cotton’s coming in nice and dry and there’s very little trash being left in the sample so at the moment ginning is just going on really well.

Jim Bible
On  farm agronomist at Agriland in Narromine.

Jim, how has the season gone so far?

Well Craig we’ve just reached the finish line and it’s been a long, hard summer. We started off with a shortage of water and we didn’t get the rainfalls that we were hoping for in February so we’ve done it tough all year, we stretched our first irrigation and then our subsequent irrigations were on time but we were still short an irrigation to an irrigation and a half and usually we get some rain in February to bail us out but that didn’t occur this year.

So as a result the crops finished off reasonably well considering the hot summer we had, especially the February heat wave we had. We had 16 days of above 40 degree temperatures and that really knocked the socks off the crop, especially in these lighter red soils that we have, we just don’t have the water holding capacity and we didn’t think there was so much damage done but with the pickers coming out of the paddock now the yields are down slightly I think because of that.

And with insect pressure during the year Jim, how was that. Has that been heavier than average?

The insect pressure early was heavy up until Christmas time and then after Christmas time to picking it would have been classed as light to moderate. The Bollgard held up very well; we had one spray and that was for some sucking pests in about early to mid January but it was just the one spray and the yields are probably reflecting that too.  

So looking to next year, we’ve just scraped through this year the 03 / 04 season, I guess the pressure really is now to look at the water situation for the 04 planting?

Yes, that’s correct Craig. At this stage we only have a 10% level in the dam so we won’t be having an allocation so that hands are in the gods now. They give us a good winter rainfall to give us some excitement for next year to plant some cotton, but we’ll speculate again on a certain amount of area and just hope that we have the water to help us out later on.

And looking at the Bollgard® situation Jim, do you think you’ll be planting at reasonable percentage of Bollgard®?

I think so, based on our allocation of course but I’d be hoping to plant you know 50-60% of our area to Bollgard. It’d be very interesting to see what these trials bring out for us but at this stage it’s definitely looking like a bit of Sicot 71 and some of those sort of shorter season varieties that we need too. The Sicot 71 has performed really well the last couple of years and we’ve had the season to let that to grow out so no, we’ll be looking for Bollgard and you know it’s encouraging, especially with the amount of insecticide sprays we’ve saved and I still have to do the numbers on the cost per hectare we’ve saved but it’s looking promising and it takes a big factor out of the equation too. If you’re not worrying about bugs you can start to concentrate on other areas, water management and nutrition and those other things that we probably tend to put on the sideline during the season.