Cotton Seed Distributors - Web on Wednesday

Rose you’ve been doing some research on row spacing, ultra narrow row and those sort of cropping systems, what have your findings been so far?

Well we’ve been looking at comparing a UNR and conventionally spaced systems mainly without any management complications and what we’ve found is that generally across a broad range of experiments that we’re not getting the yield or maturity differences that we would expect, so that’s the broad findings.

And looking at that research work, obviously the plant per metre and spacing is important?

Yes that’s what we though so we did some population trials to look at because we are increasing the density three fold in the UNR systems going from 10 or 12 plants to 30 plants per metre squared; so we looked at reducing that population to see if it was the row spacing effect or just plant density. What we found was that by lowering the population density from 30 to 12 didn’t have a big difference so there was something else going on there in the close row spacing, not just spacing but there’s some other interaction that’s causing this lack of yield and maturity differences.

Could you just define ultra narrow row, what the spacings are? There’s been a lot of discussions lately on 15 inch cotton. Could you just define those different systems?

Yes well in the US when they talk about UNR they include the 15 inch and the 10 inch, so my work has been based mostly around the 25cm, but also the 38cm or 15 inch and narrow rows are generally 75cm but we’ve been looking at both and we’ve found that there’s no real difference between the row spacings compared to conventional cotton or between them themselves.

Where have your trials been this last season?

This last season we had trials down in Hillston. We had a pix and no pix trial in Hillston and the same one was here at the station at Myall Vale and there were no differences between the regions and in previous years we also had a site at Breeza.

Just looking at pix, with that work with no differences will you continue that?

Yes, we will have a look as this was just one regime of pix and what we wanted to do was apply the same pix strategy to both conventional and UNR spacings because often they can be quite different and have a look at it, so it was sort of just a broad rate but what we want to do is go into looking at monitoring the vegetative rate and applying pix as needed and see if there is a pix application rate that does give us some benefits in UNR.

So your work so far, has it been with conventional or Bollgard or are you incorporating Roundup® Ready into those trials?

They’ve all been with Sicala V-3Ri and so for the last three years we’ve done Sicala V-3Ri across all the regions and trials and we also looked at a Bollgard® II trial this year; however that was probably not a really suitable Bollgard® II variety for UNR, so we’ll be looking at Bollgard® II in the future.

With the improvements we’ve seen in the picking equipment for particularly the 15-inch cotton system, we will see increases in area in that?

I think so, there are reports from Hillston that anything up to 80% of the area in 15-inch they quite like the performance of 15-inch down there; however there is a consideration if you’re not gaining those cheaper harvesting costs that you can with stripper harvesting whether or not you do get an increase in yield because my trials were all done using hand picks so there were no picker complications there.

And looking at gaps in plant stands in normal meter spacing gaps are not very good. What are your comments on gaps in the plant stand in ultra narrow row systems?

My work hasn’t specifically looked at that, our population stuff was very even plant stand and they were hand thinned but it’s very important in terms of harvesting. If you get a lot of branching you can get the harvester/stripper clogged up and work in the US has definitely shown that that UNR that having a uniform plant density is as important in UNR as it is in conventional.

So looking at the future obviously a full range of trials planned for next season coming up?

Yes, we want to look at conventional and Bollgard pix interactions and populations and over a wide variety of row spacings. We’ll be doing some preliminary work into that this year because we really want to look at a more agronomic level. My work has been mainly at a physiological level but we want to look at applying different management strategies and seeing how UNR responds to those.

And if anyone is interested in getting results of your trials so far, where would they go to find that information?

Further Information:  Robert Eveleigh, John Marshall,  Craig McDonald or David Kelly