Today, cotton grower and ginning company representatives from Central Queensland and the Darling Downs discuss progress with picking and ginning and outline yield and fibre quality coming from this year’s crop.

Nev we are here at Emerald on 2^nd May, a pretty late pick for this district?

Very much so John.  We would normally have been at least two weeks earlier than this; however with the hail damage that we got early in October and rain following we didn’t get our crop planted until the, ^first week in November, so we have got a very late sort of harvest this time.  We have run into problems with defoliation through cooler weather, very unusual for Emerald when we normally harvest in probably the latter part of February, March. So we have had a trying season this year with the hot weather then experiencing a lot of rain when this crop was being defoliated which delayed harvest. It allowed later bolls to mature so hopefully they are going to be a benefit to us for yield and to pull the micronaire down this year.

So that late rain, it had both negative and positive affects to some extent in that while some crop has been lost to bollrot you have produced some later crop with some varieties: would that be right?

That is right John, we have suffered a fair bit of boll lock.  Not so much boll rot but boll lock this year. With the later maturing bolls hopefully we will get the micronaire down and be compensated a little bit for the loss on the lower part of the crop.

And some of the varieties have ended up pretty tall with the long growing season?

Yes John, I think we are probably getting to the stage with our varieties where some of them need different management than the other ones in the trial plots.   I just don’t know how we are going to overcome that with replicated trial plots, where we are trying to spread the one variety across the different soil types  We have got some very tall crops and under the management imposed,  we have also got some very short ones as well. 

There is a fair bit of dust evident around the pickers this year?

Yes, very black.  The leaf drop took place during a lot of rainy showery weather, so instead of falling onto the ground it just wrapped onto the first thing it hit and then the fungus got into it and it has produced plenty of dust and a lot of trash in the crop.

 That late rain that caused the problems, to some extent has given you a chance of thinking about next year ?

They say that there is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. So yes, we have got potential water for a limited crop for next year..  There is quite a bit of carryover but after they have taken off the allowances for evaporation and capping, we will probably anticipate about 54% of any carryover water we have got for this year. But at the moment there has been no allocation made for next year so we won’t know that until probably the start of the next water year which is basically the financial year.

Peter, here we are at the start of May.  Can you give us a bit of an idea of how things are progressing with ginning in Central Queensland?

Well John it has been rather a different season up here, my first season in Central Queensland.  Presently we are just over half way ginned at Emerald and around the same over at Moura.  Ginning has been going well. At Emerald, there was an early plant and a late plant. We are in the situation where the later planted cotton is coming in at the moment. It received significant rainfall just before Easter so we are just getting in and ginning some of that later cotton now.

And as far as grades go on that later cotton, have you seen much difference?

We have really only got stuck into it recently.  The main thing that it has been characterised because of that rainfall.  There has been a fair bit of green leaf in the seed cotton that is coming in.  Also the colour is looking a little bit off in the module form and also at the sample.  But as I say we are still waiting to get some more results back from the classing room before we can say anything really decisive about it.

Now just concentrating on the key quality issues this year, I guess cotton at the higher end of the micronaire scale is the most important one.  What’s the story so far ?

There are two things that have been an issue this year, one being the increase of the base grade to 36, and also the micronaire. People have been keeping a fairly close eye on micronaire in the last few years and this year has been no different because of the tightening quality parameters.  The concern about 35 length staple has been something that initially we thought we were going to have some dramas with, particularly because we had an extremely hot summer up here, and there had been a lot of Sicot 71 varieties planted.  We saw some shorter staple early, more so from the Dawson Callide.  Over here at Emerald, just to give you an example, only 4% of what we have actually classed out of the Emerald region has been 35 length,the majority of it has been  36 and 37, so length hasn’t turned out to be much concern.   Micronaire has been a different story.  It has been predominantly out of the premium range of micronaire, much of it in  4.6 – 4.9 G5A, and some has  been pushing into the G6 range.There has been an incidence of G7 micronaire as well. 

The very early cotton that came in, was it pretty satisfactory grades?

As far as colour and leaf goes, the earlier cotton that we have been ginning has been  really good in terms of colour and leaf..Obviously there are things that we can do at the gin here with leaf that can have some affect on the length but with the amount of leaf that was in the early cotton, it didn’t take too much work to get it up to a base grade as least.  Micronaire is something that is totally out of our control.  We are concerned about this later cotton as I mentioned.  The sample is not quite as bright and we are also seeing a high amount of green leaf.

Neil you have been picking now for a couple of weeks, how are things generally going?  

All in all John it has been pretty good to us.  The weather has been spot on.  We have pushed fairly hard but having said that, we have been able to wait until the weather has been on our side to pick, and we have got a few days off in between while waiting for it to mature properly. All in all, it has gone really well.

And yield wise, how are things going?

Well I guess we planted mainly two varieties, 43BR and 71BR and I am very impressed with the yield of both of them, particularly the fusarium resistance of the 43BR.

You’ve have had a bit of classing done- what has been the story there?

Yes, I am very much surprised. Up until this year we have never or  very rarely grown any 11’s and this year we have had 1200 bales already ginned, with over half of that  being 11-1’s and 37 in length.

At the start of the season you took a bit of a gamble.  You had hardly any water in the storage, you went for a solid plant and a fair sized planting.  Why has the season turned around so well?

I think taking a bit of a gamble is an understatement, but we have got the infrastructure to take advantage if the season does change.  We did plant all solid and probably the varieties that we chose, particularly the 71BR may have not been a good choice if it did turn against us, but we happened to get the water earlier on. Although the season didn’t  finish off as we would have liked,  we had enough water to get us through and get us a pretty good result.

And the heat over the Christmas/New Year period does not have seemed to caused any problems ?

Except for aging me about 5 years, it seems to have done the crop pretty good.  The grain crops didn’t think much of it.  We payed the price for planting sorghum early, but the cotton, with getting the water onto in time, it responded well when the January rain came.

Simon, here we are at the start of May.  How is  picking progressing on the Downs at this stage?

With picking at this point across the Downs, irrigated/dryland we are looking at it being 55 – 60% completed.  There are a number of modules on the ground already and as you can see, we have got nearly 2400 modules here in the yard, that is including what we have ginned so far as well.  So we are about half way at this point on receivals.

Just concentrating on the dryland initially, it has been quite a variable year across the Downs.  What’s the spread we are seeing in yield?

Well  with the dryland obviously there was a very very hard finish once again in January/February.  Yields are ranging  from 0.6  bale to just over 2 and depending on turnouts to 2.2 bales/acre maybe.  So the dryland at this point has probably come out reasonably well.

And fibre quality, in particular fibre length, are we seeing anything from those lower yielding crops. How are they hanging in there as far as length goes?

The lower yielding crops have been a little surprising from the point of view of  staple length-it has been probably been around the 34,35, 36 staple which is probably a little bit longer than what they expected considering the finish.  So the discounts have been a bit of a relief to growers in a way.  They are about $20.00 per bale instead of the $50.00 that they probably expected.

Now moving onto the irrigated, obviously we started the season on the Downs with very little water and a lot of people moved to skip row configurations. Yield wise, how are things looking from the irrigated?

Yield wise exceptional actually.  We have got cotton going from three bales to some above 5 bales/acre.  The highest I have heard so far is about 5.3 and the lowest is probably a little over 3.  With the skip row configuration I believe down the row, there has been up to 6.5 bales (delete this last comment from tape, see my note)

And some very good grades are coming out as well from the early cotton?

Very good grades.  The irrigated cotton has been 11-1 colour 1 leaf up to 21-2’s and 3’s.  Staple length has been 36-37 staple plus and the strength is 28grams per tex plus.  So the cotton is exceptional.  Micronaire in particular has been very favourable to the growers on the Downs of 3.8-4.5 which is basically where we would like to see it instead of 4.6-4.9.

And finally, just on turnouts.  Fairly similar to last year?

Turnouts, are similar to last year.  There are some varieties that turnouts are actually up to around 39%+ but the gin at the moment is averaging about 38%.  The irrigated is probably averaging 38 to 39% with  a little bit over 40% .