Moree cotton crop 'setting up nicely'
Picking time at Caroale for Moree farmer Mick Humphries and wife Emma, with children Thomas (from left), Grace and Ascher. Pictures supplied
It's been a nervous start to the cotton season for Moree farmer Mick Humphries, who has been keeping a close watch on the weather forecasts.
After an exceptionally wet winter that slowed summer crop ground preparation, the past few months have been unusually stormy, bringing the threat of heavy rain and hail.
"We haven't had any hail but there has been sporadic damage around the area," Mr Humphries said.
"The storms have been so hit and miss; we haven't had general rain. A thunderstorm will just pop up and dump a heap of rain in a small area. And if you're under the wrong one, we get hail.
"It's a very, very random, stormy summer."
Nonetheless, temperatures have mostly been mild - averaging 33 degrees in November and 35.5 in December - and they've managed to avoid the heatwaves making headlines elsewhere across the state, so the cotton is looking very good.
"We've had a couple of hot days, but nothing too strenuous ... mid-30s is ideal," he said.
"The crop's really starting to load up on fruit so it's setting itself up nicely coming into peak flower."
Mr Humphries and his wife Emma farm 3000 hectares at Caroale, north of Moree, and Chesney, near Mallawa, south west of Moree, in the North West Plains region. The farms have been in the family for more than a century.
They produce winter wheat, chickpea and barley crops, and summer crops of cotton and sorghum on a 2m controlled traffic farming system in the dryland areas to match up with machinery used in the irrigated portion.
Soils on both properties are mostly heavy, grey vertosols.
Average annual rainfall in the area is about 550mm although it has been highly variable in the past 20 years, with as little as 125.4mm recorded at Moree in 2019 followed two years later by 883mm.
Moree farmer Mick Humphries was impressed by last year's trials of the new XtendFlex variety, Siokra 253B3XF, and has chosen to plant 160ha of it.
After back-to-back cotton crops during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in elevated levels of soil-borne disease, such as verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt and black root rot, Mr Humphries now alternates summer crops between cotton and sorghum.
The practice has improved cotton yields and soil health, with only mild signs of verticillium wilt appearing in hotter, drier years.
Even so, Mr Humphries estimates disease costs the business as much as 20 per cent of its gross income each year, a sum he is keen to claw back.
He's been involved with disease research by the Cotton Research and Development Corporation for many years, and is eager to see the outcomes from the five-year Australian Cotton Disease Collaboration announced in August.
Mr Humphries said last year's cotton crop was better than average "but not spectacular", yielding an average of about 13.6 bales per hectare from the irrigated portion and about 3.7 bales per hectare from the rainfed.
Preparation for this year's irrigated cotton crop began after harvesting the 2023-24 sorghum crop, with spreading of a mono-ammonium phosphate (MAP) and potash blend at 300kg/ha.
The fertiliser was spread and incorporated before the hills were pulled up in February and fields were left fallow to consolidate through the winter months.
Guided by soil tests, up to 400kg/ha of urea was applied in August and the fields rolled off, followed by side dressing of urea in-crop in December.
"We generally aim to have about 320kg/ha of nitrogen under the crop by Christmas," Mr Humphries said.
"We'll do soil tests in July to get our background levels, and then we'll also do petiole tests through the growing season, just to keep track of where we're at."
After being impressed by last year's trials of the new XtendFlex variety, Siokra 253B3XF, Mr Humphries has chosen to plant 160ha of the variety along with 600ha of Sicot 606B3F.
"The 606 is our staple," he said.
"We know it performs. And then 253 is a newer variety, which we're really excited about. It's got a good disease package, and I think it suits our soil type here, so that's why we've chosen to grow it."
Using a John Deere Max Emerge planter with precision upgrades, he planted the cotton at 13.5 seeds to the metre on 1m row spacings from mid-October.
Weeds are a constant battle, especially now that herbicide resistance is beginning to appear, particularly in grass weeds, in the region.
Mr Humphries uses a combination of knockdown sprays and pre-emergent herbicides to combat feathertop Rhodes grass and barnyard grass, and peach vine and sow thistle before planting, followed by up to three in-crop applications of glyphosate before row closure.
Pests have been less of a problem this season, requiring just one mirid spray to date.
Crops at Caroale are irrigated using a siphon and flood furrow irrigation system that draws water sourced from Copeton Dam on the Gwydir River and groundwater from on-farm bores.
