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John Marshall and Robert Eveleigh, CSD Extension and Development Agronomists, discuss prospects for dryland cotton for this coming season.

John could you give us a quick review of last years Dryland season on the Darling Downs?

It was an excellent season really from both a fibre yield and quality point of view. It was a season of well spaced, very good rainfall events and then good periods of growing weather in between, so overall there was close to 35,000 ha of Dryland on the Downs last year and it averaged close to two bales per acre and from the fibre quality point of view a lot of twenty one two’s and three’s, thirty six length and mid range micronaire.

And what about insects, were they much of a problem last season?

No, there was a bit of pressure around about Christmas time, which certainly was a bit of a concern for a while but during February and March in particular they backed right off and that probably counted for a lot of the good late crop.

And for the coming season what do the prospects look like on the Downs?

Last summer was very wet and from a profile moisture point of view things are really excellent so probably as good a soil moisture as we’ve had for a number of years, but basically for most of the Downs it hasn’t rained since the first week in March. Fifty millimetres of rainfall sometime in the next month and half to two months will certainly get most people started. Certainly the three-month prediction isn’t good but basically all we need is fifty millimetres to get things started and then rain is not really required until December.

I guess the other major change this year for Dryland growers has being the removal of the cap for Bollgard® II plantings. Do you think that will have any significant impact on the uptake of that technology?

I think with Bollgard® II we will see it a bit to some extent this year but I think in times to come we’ll see a big uptake of Bollgard® II because for a Dryland grower one of the greatest ponderings has always been the cost of insect control because it’s such a high proportion of their input costs and how a grower can particularly against growing skip row at $250 a hectare it’s reduced by 50% or 33% and then in most cases just possibly one spray for Mirids and one for aphids, so they’ve got a pretty good idea of what their insect control costs and they can go to their banker with that. I think the other thing to is that from a fibre quality point of view I think we’ll see more people going to skip row to maintain that fibre quality and the big concern for a lot of growers was basically if big skip row plants got out of control with the wet February, well Bollgard® II removes such concerns to a large extent.

The Dryland crop in the New South Wales growing areas last year Rob; how did it turn out?

Well I guess we had a different scenario to the Darling Downs, we had less fallow moisture in the profile to begin with following the drought and we probably got near average rainfall on the crop following that, but soil moisture is critical to keep the crop moving along between falls of rain and what we found was certainly the crop in the western part of the area was quite severely moisture stressed on several occasions and that showed through in the yields and in the quality, whereas the eastern crop on the eastern side of the highway and where they had favorable moisture to start with was quite good, in fact some very good yields came off in that area east of the highway up around the two bales per acre and slightly above, so very good conditions there. As you move further to the west I think the yields drop back to certainly in some cases less than a bale, around 0.7/0.8 of a bale, so I guess a contrasting season from that point of view.

Looking ahead to this season now, what are growers doing as far as the split between cotton and sorghum at this stage?

I think people will make that call closer to time. A lot of people haven’t made up their minds yet. The price prospects for both those commodities is not brilliant. Certainly the prospect of a very large sorghum plant up in your neck of the woods in Queensland has got quite a few of the little local growers worried and you know the cotton price hasn’t been brilliant but is starting to firm up a little bit now. I guess the other thing with cotton, certainly in this area, quite a few growers got their hands on contracts a year or so ago at quite good money, so that will certainly ensure that base amount of cotton goes in and it’s a very easy decision when you’ve got a fair bit of the cotton sold at $550 a bale, but growers will make that decision closer to planting time and I think, as in any decision of what crop to grow, it’s based on price and agronomic benefits of both crop and so forth.

I guess last season was the first year we’ve really seen any quantity of Bollgard® II in commercial fields and also in CSD trials. How did it perform generally in the trials that you saw?

Well in Dryland the technology performed exceptionally well as far as insect control goes, I don’t think there were too many people that had any problems there with heliothis control and in general the sucking pests that you would maybe expect to follow in a no spray regime for heliothis. They weren’t too bad, a lot of the crops only had between zero and two sprays for those extra sucking pests. A lot of the other pests didn’t become a problem, so you know we’re very happy with it from a point of view of insect control and in general pretty happy with it in terms of yield. I think in most cases it yielded as well if not better than the conventional crops around here. I guess where there was some concern and some disappointment was in those crops that certainly hit the wall as far as moisture goes. They had very large boll loads on them and there were some impacts on quality. Strangely enough not so much length, generally the lengths were all pretty good last year but certainly in terms of micronaire.

There were some individual growers that were particularly hard hit by low micronaire, which is the opposite to what we’ve been seeing perhaps in some of the Dryland crops where the micronaire has been climbing higher than that. There seems to be an issue there that maybe the crop is more susceptible to low micronaire just purely because it’s squeezed for resources compared to its boll load.

A lot of issues that are important to Dryland growers this season will be covered in a series of workshops, which are coming up Rob. Could you just enlarge on those?

It’s a pretty important series of workshops that we normally have for Dryland growers each season and we’re going to kick off at Balata on the 7th September 4pm at the Golf Club. The next one will be at Goondiwindi Leagues Club on the 9th at 10am start there and we’re going to finish off at Dalby at 4pm also on the 9th and that meeting will be held at Cotton House.

And just quickly, what topics will be covered in those meetings?

We’ll be certainly concentrating on Bollgard® II management for Dryland. I think the area of Bollgard® II planted for Dryland this year is going to be quite significant, it’s still relatively new to growers and growers really need to understand the implications of some of the management things that they normally do and how they’re going to impact on this new technology, so it’ll be a good look at that and also looking at price prospects and comparisons and other summer crop options. 

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