Cotton growers and consultants comments from - North:
- Emerald - Hamish Millar,
- the Downs - John Marshall,
- Theodore - Peter French,
- St George/Dirranbandi - Peter Haslem

Hamish Millar - Emerald
Hamish, there has been a couple of small increases in allocation in the Emerald area in the last couple of months. What area has actually been planted now that we are right at the end of the Bollgard II® window.

John, I think what we have seen now is a 13% increase in Fairbairn Dam so that has given growers a fair bit of courage to plant a bit more. My understanding is that we are around about that 12,000 hectares now for the Emerald Irrigation Area.

When you drive through the area it is quite obvious there is a considerable spread in planting dates. That’s been brought on by a few things, hail included?

Yes, hail and the timely rain as well so initially before the rain I think the expected area may have been around that sort of the 10,000 hectares. But with the rain and the hail it’s increased planting up to around that 12,000 hectares. I think what we are going to see is a real spread on our cropping this year. What that might do is just give us a good understanding of our farming system work in CQ.

And with the move this year to a later Bollgard window, at this stage a good decision you think?

It is John I think. Certainly with the hail as well it has allowed growers to replant Bollgard, if we didn’t have the window extended we would be all going back to conventional cotton I think. But time will tell. We will just see at the end of the season how the yields and the quality go but I think it is certainly a good start to see how things will go in the future.

And just talking about those crops that have been established, a very good start in general?

Yes, an excellent start. I think it is the best, apart from the hail, it’s been the best start with strike wise and get up and go so the cotton is looking really good.

And this was partly brought on by some reasonable rain during the winter this year as well?

Yes it has to so it has all been a good start and its looking really good.

Now obviously the uptake of Roundup Ready® is very large in the area. What practices do you, yourself and most other growers, still using some residuals and getting full over-the-tops in?

It’s a mixed bag for us John. What we have decided on with our business is, depending on the weed pressure of the fields there, if there is a heavier weed pressure we will apply residual herbicides. But on fields that we are comfortable with now we have got good weed control we won’t do residuals. We are still in that transitional stage where we haven’t really made a decision completely and I think its just a few variables but I suppose looking forward to the future with Flex coming on I think that will probably relieve any use of residuals over time depending.

Finally, any other problems with the Roundup Ready? Volunteers or drift that type of thing this season.

Volunteers are always a concern for Central Queensland because we don’t have a very heavy wintering period so they are always growing. What we have done here is just gone into really a Roundup Ready, Sprayseed sort of rotation so years ago we didn’t use a lot of sprays but now we are and we find that that is one of the most affective tools to cleanup volunteers.

And drift, no big concerns this year?

With that rain and the crops emerging and as you are aware in Central Queensland crops grow very quickly here so the window to get your Roundup on is not large and that forced a lot of growers to take up and use aerial application for the Roundup but there was very good communication with all growers, we all spoke through our area wide management up here. Spoke about our intentions and understood where our neighbors paddocks and fields were and who had Roundup Ready and who didn’t and to this date I think we have got through unscathed and I think that the key to that was just good communication with our growers.

John Marshall - Darling Downs
When did cotton planting get underway on the Downs this year, John.

This year the Bollgard II® window for the majority of the Downs growers was changed to extend from the mid October until the end of November. Consequently there was very little planting that had occurred prior to that. For that reason as well as the fact that most dryland growers couldn’t plant because of lack of soil moisture and the majority of irrigators were very short of water as well.

What have the conditions been like since planting got underway?

Planting got underway on that Saturday, 15th October and that night the rain started and basically the story since then has been trying to jam a bit of cotton in between major rainfall events. And here we are in the second half of November and there is people still buying seed and trying to get it into the ground at this stage.

What do you think the total area of cotton would be like this year, after people finish planting?

Last year on the Downs there was around about 55,000 ha and the total looks like being very close to that again. The split at this stage looks like it will be about 55% irrigated and 45% dryland but its important to realize that when we are talking about irrigated, quite a bit of that has been planted in skip row formations because people are short of water and even with the bit of pumping that a number of growers have done and quite a few growers along the branch and along the Condamine have pumped up to a couple of hundred megs. A lot of that irrigated cotton is very much still in a supplementary irrigation style.

What are the early weeds and disease conditions like this year so far?

Not surprising with the quantity of rain that parts of the Downs have had and there are some parts of the Downs that have close to 250mls in four weeks. The weed burden is enormous and a lot of people have been waiting to get onto the ground to say get their first over the tops on their Roundup Ready and control their fallow paddocks. But when weeds are growing it means that the weather conditions have been good and I don’t think anyone is complaining about that. As far as disease goes, obviously with the conditions that we have had, particularly over in this more eastern Downs area, Fusarium is likely to raise its head and a lot of growers pre-empted this by choosing varieties like Sicot 14B in particular for a lot of their worst paddocks.

Peter French - Theodore
Peter, the crops in the Theodore district this year. It is a bit of a mixed bag at this stage?

Oh yes, quite a mixed bag at this stage John. A lot of crops were planted in September and they got established before the rain came and they’re doing very well as I hear, but unfortunately I don’t have any of them.

This paddock we are in here are the moment, it was watered up?

Yes this was watered up starting on the 10th of October and 5 days later we just ended up putting about 1 ¼ to 1 ½ megalitres on it per hectare and then promptly got another 1 ½ megalitres per hectare over the next week on top of it.

This district is only sort of moved to watering up as a practice with the wide scale introduction of Roundup Ready®, what, anything to learn from what has happened this year as far as watering up goes?

Well this is basically our first attempt but we moved to the watering up because of our water situation. We were faced with a zero allocation for this coming season and it was the first year we had a carryover ability for only one month so we elected to water quite a bit of it up in October so that we would last quite a bit longer. Not expecting to get all that rain on top of it.

As far as depth of planting and back to back fields, any changes there you are thinking about or are you pretty happy with those sorts of practices?

No, I think we are pretty happy with that at this stage. I think the watering up scenario would have worked very well had we have not got the wet weather on top.

What about the crops themselves that have suffered from this excess of water. Are they showing any real symptoms, we can see that there is certainly, they are not as advanced certainly as those earlier crops, anything else showing up?

Oh yes for sure, we certainly lost quite a bit of our plant stand. It’s a little bit gappy in places but the biggest problem was that they just haven’t been thrifty at all, the root system has been fairly severely affected.

And what about getting the over the top sprays on. Has everything gone alright there?

Yes no problem there. We have managed to be able to get our over the top herbicides on at this stage.

And that has been basically, you have got two on most of the crop?

No. We have only got one over the top on some of our country.

And, to pull these crops out of it, what have you got on order now?

We have just completed putting a foliar fertiliser application on it and we are sort of hoping, looking at the weather that we might actually get another shower of rain on it because the root system is so weak at this stage only surface roots and so we are a little bit stranded in the dry soil up the top even though there is heaps of moisture underneath. So I am just hoping for a little bit of rain and I think that will kick it along and it will be away.

Peter Haslem - St George/Dirranbandi
Peter Haslam, who does some agronomy at St. George and Dirranbandi. It’s the 16th of November Peter, the Bollgard II® planting date has finished, can you give us a bit of a rundown on most of the crops were planted in St George and Dirranbandi?

Yes, this year planting commenced about the last week of September and a majority of the planting, I would say about 70% of it was completed by the 1st week in October. Additional planting was a little bit later at the middle of the month, with people with limited water this year and we had some rain about that same period, about the 15th October and some additional planting went in the last week in October.

What are the conditions generally been like for crop establishment?

This year has been pretty good with early winter rainfall and things. The tilth was the best we have seen in a number of years and the plants got away to a great start. Warm temperatures at planting, really good window so the crops established very well and good stands and its one of the better starts I have seen.

We have had a bit of rainfall during the October period, has that caused any dramas at all?

It did cause some seedling losses in the early plant but overall it wasn’t very significant and there was not replants of a result of the rain on that early plant but the blokes who had limited water actually the watering up coincided with that rain event and those crops did suffer and some replanting did occur. In my acreage it would have only probably been about 1% of my area so it is not very significant. But to those growers who did not have the water it was a bit of a problem.

Have you had any hail at all?

Very light and just made a mention but no serious damage. There have been some reports around St. George but fortunately my growers haven’t seen it.

Now we are in the middle of November, what stage are most of your crops up to from the early plant to the late plant?

Early plants running between 9 and 12 nodes and growing really well. Coming up to their first water some crops have already started that missed out on the rain and probably in the next 7 to 10 days the majority will be starting to water. The second plant is probably 6 leaf. That is the stuff planted in the middle of October and then the late stuff is 4 leaf at the moment.

What’s the insect pressure been like up to now?

Heliothis wise it has been pretty good. Its probably Heliothis and army worm about three weeks ago in the early plant and more the army worm are causing some problems and some isolated crops were sprayed. Just in the last 5 days the heliothis are really come in with a vengeance and we have had egg lays from anywhere from 20 to 50 eggs starting late last week and continuing right up until today. Thrip wise, we don’t generally get a lot of thrips up here and most crops don’t need spraying for them. Mirid pressure has been pretty good we have just had an adult mirid coming through, laying some eggs and getting a few nymphs floating around but generally farms haven’t been sprayed yet for mirids.

So generally a pretty good start?

I think, the memory is going, but I think it is probably one of the better ones I can remember.

Further Information:
John Marshall,  David Kelly