IT’S been a long, dry finish to this year’s cotton crop for Moree farmer, Warwick Wannan, who said the bulk of his cotton hardly got a drop of rain from late November through to defoliation.
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And then it copped 25 millimetres.
Yield was down from its potential as a result – not the ending to the season he’d expected after such an ideal start, but quality remained good.
Mr Wannan runs the 1200-hectare “Wirra”, between Collarenabri and Moree, with his wife, Roslyn, and their boys, Tim, who has worked there for six years, and Matthew, who has just returned to the farm after five years as a Caterpillar plant mechanic.
Mr Wannan said he has been growing cotton for 31 years and the past decade had been one of the driest, this year being the first in seven he could irrigate to meet 100 per cent of the crop’s demands from start to finish.
“Wirra’s” cotton area included 380ha this year, with Sicot 71BRF on the irrigated fields and V24BRF and V16BR sown on the dryland.
All up, the dryland constituted 324ha and this was the last year the Monsanto license would allow him to use V16BR, as V24BRF, an improved weed and insect protection genetic package, was being phased in in its place.
This, however, allowed him to use up stored seed, which he hadn’t had the opportunity to grow until the season broke last spring.
The seed was sown at 10 kilograms a hectare on the irrigated country and five kilograms a hectare in double skip on the dryland.
He said they had an excellent start to November, which got the crop established, but have had no rain since.
“So the crop had a good start and an extremely difficult finish,” Mr Wannan said.
“The yields were down, but I was still happy with the yields I got.”
He picked about two bales a hectare from the dryland, which all classed as base grade, alleviating expectations of an immature fibre that finished too short and measured poorly on micronaire.
“But the parameters were all good,” he said.
He sowed the dryland crop into a full profile of moisture when the season was in good shape.
A rainfall of 55mm followed within three weeks of sowing, helping the crop to establish, but for the rest of the season he had only 40mm in 10 falls.
“After defoliating we had 25mm,” he said.
The irrigated crop yielded 10 bales a hectare – “a good average crop”, and this too went base grade, he said.
The crop was grown using conventional furrow irrigation, watered from the on-farm 2000 megalitre capacity water storage, fed from Copeton Dam via the Mehi River.
He said his storages were already empty again after the crop had been grown, so he was looking for a good flush down the river.
“The Gwydir Valley is the only valley in NSW that hasn’t had a major flood in the past eight months, so our turn must be coming,” he said.
He applied two Roundup sprays in crop to the irrigated fields, as well as two inter-row cultivations, while the dryland fields had two sprays, but no in-crop cultivation.
North West Ginning, Moree, received the crop, which had been two-thirds sold on a forward contract through Namoi Cotton for an average of $556 a bale, with the rest yet to be sold.
“Goodness knows what the rest of it will be sold for,” he said.
