Dry land cotton took a beating this season, with yields and quality heavily impacted.
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Cotton Australia’s regional manager for northern NSW, Paul Sloman, said the long, hot summer was the key factor.
“It was a very tough year – yields were well below average; that tough heat,” he said.
“A lot of growers will be glad to have the season behind us and better luck next year.”
Breeza farmer, Andrew Pursehouse, planted 840 hectares of cotton this year – half dryland, half irrigated.
“Irrigated yields are above average but dry land yields were below average,” he said.
“The dryland’s been disappointing through the whole cotton area from Queensland to NSW because of that really hot summer we had, but the irrigated has been fairly good in places, so long as people had the water.”
Picking at Breeza Station wrapped up in in mid-June, producing 7000 bales of processed cotton.
“We’ve only had some dryland [cotton] ginned – 80 per cent of our cotton goes to Carroll gin and the other 20 per cent goes to Boggabri gin,” Mr Pursehouse said.
“We’ve carted all ourselves and we’ve carted fairly well carted three-quarters of it.
“Most of it these days gets exported. It goes to Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, China.”
Mr Pursehouse said the price of cotton was good and he would also receive income from the cotton seed, which is utilised as sheep and cattle feed, and the oil seed industry.
“At the moment cotton’s the most economic crop to grow,” he said.
Mr Sloman said there were growers still picking because of the spring rain and irrigated cotton was down 20-25 per cent on previous yields.
“The season is almost finished [but] it’s a good month behind average,” he said.
“At this point in the North West, there’s probably 5-10 per cent of cotton still in the ground to be picked, which is highly unusual when you look at the average.
“Cotton was more difficult to defoliate and it was a bit exposed to inclement weather, so that caused further quality issues.”
Despite seasonal difficulties, Mr Sloman said there were about 20 new growers in the upper Namoi and the number was likely to increase next year.