New Cotton Varieties Shine in the Macintyre Valley

About 30 Macintyre Valley cotton growers and consultants recently attended a series of field walks, hosted by Cotton Seed Distributors, showcasing the next generation of Australian-bred cotton varieties.

CSD’s Macintyre Valley-based extension and development agronomist, David Kelly, said a huge effort was dedicated to collecting detailed information on Sicot 70BRF, a new variety that will be available in commercial quantities for the 2008 plant, following a limited release in 2007.

“Data from CSIRO and CSD experiments indicate that its yield potential is equal to Sicot 71BR and Sicot 71B, currently the most popular varieties grown in the Macintyre. In addition, it has improved resistance to both fusarium and verticillium wilts, and an excellent fibre quality package.”

James Quinn, CSD’s Gwydir-based extension and development agronomist, has been monitoring several Sicot 70BRF crops over the past two seasons, and suggests the established rules of management that apply to Sicot 71B and Sicot 71BR will be the same for this new variety.

“We found similar vegetative growth, hence the same discretion needs to be applied when using plant growth regulators, and well-timed early irrigations will set up a plant capable of producing a good boll load.”

Detailed assessments of crops in the 2006-07 season found that under the same conditions, Sicot 70BRF produced as many bolls and of similar size to Sicot 71BR, hence the similarity in yield.

David Kelly also outlined the pipeline for new variety releases with Bollgard II® Roundup Ready Flex, which included an impressive array of improvements in yield, fibre quality and disease resistance.

Also of interest was discussion on the impending release of Bollgard II® varieties stacked with Liberty Link™ an exciting new herbicide-tolerant technology, currently available to growers in non-Bollgard II varieties only.

CSD this week picked the first of its many large-scale replicated variety trials. The results of these trials will be posted on www.csd.net.au immediately they become available.