Cotton looking strong in the south.

Despite minimal in-season rainfall, cotton crops in southern NSW are looking extremely promising. .
CSD agronomist Bob Ford said around 3200 ha of cotton was planted in the Murrumbidgee and Lachlan areas – similar to the past two seasons but a lack of irrigation water means its a far cry from the 20,000 ha crops a decade ago.

“Most cotton this season is irrigated from bore allocations, supplemented with small allocations from the dams,” he said.

“Most crops have used around seven megalitres per hectare of water so far and will probably use up to 10megalitres for the season unless we get some in-crop rain,” he said.

“The start of the season was tough with very cold conditions which brought on seedling diseases and so some plant stands were affected through this period but generally they recovered well,” he said.

“The season from November onwards has been good – insect pressure has been very low with only the occasional spray being applied for green mirids, hence the retention on most crops is high,” he said.

“People have applied cut-out rates of the plant growth regulator Pix in the last two weeks and with a good finish yields should be excellent,” he said.

Bob Ford said the adoption of the Bollgard II and Roundup Ready Flex technologies in the southern areas had been strong – making up almost 100 percent of the area this season.

“The Bollgard II is such an important tool for crop earliness – something essential in these regions, and the Roundup Ready Flex gives people a lot more options with their weed management,” he said.

“The high yielding Sicot 71 BRF is the main variety being grown in the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee this season because of the great results we’ve had from that group of varieties in recent seasons,” he said.

This season we’ve got three large scale replicated varieties trials at ‘Kilburnie’, near Griffith and ‘Merrowie’ and ‘Yilgah’ at Hillston, where we’ve got Sicot 71BRF up against a number of potential new varieties for this region” he said.

Bob Ford said field days are being organised at these trial sites for late February and early March.

“Some of the new varieties are very promising and growers will be very interested to see how they look in the field,” he said.

Further Information:
Bob Ford 0267 950000

3 February 2010

Above: Ben Minalto ‘Rudds Point’, Griffith and CSD Agronomist Bob Ford inspect a field of Sicot 71BRF.

Above: Inspecting the large scale CSD variety trial at Twynam ‘Merrowie’ operation at Hillston are consultant Allan Jones, farm hand Brock McGary, farm manager Mick Yerbury and Twynam senior agronomist Mal Pritchard.