Wincott is a network for all women involved both directly and indirectly in the Australian cotton industry, offering an alternative opportunity for them to increase their knowledge and develop their skills. The network caters for all levels of knowledge and confidence, from women who wish to increase their knowledge of cotton growing and the cotton industry through to women who may wish to undertake a broader role within the industry or in the wider agricultural sector. Wincott activities provide long term benefits and foster mainstream participation. The network is cost effective and uses existing industry structures and a wide range of resources to achieve its aims and objectives..

Cotton growers need to make weather or climate related management decision all the time. Although we have some scientific basis to forecast the season ahead, most cotton growers make only limited use of our current understanding of climate variability, seasonal predictability and projected future climate trends. Primary producers in Queensland and NSW are familiar with ENSO (EI Nino - Southern Oscillation) based seasonal climate forecasts. Close interaction with the cotton industry has revealed that frequently the key issue is not the question 'how reliable are these forecastsΓ' but rather 'how can I use this information to improve overall risk management and hence my economic and environmental performanceΓ' This important distinction highlights that the bottleneck for climate risk management is riot necessarily our understanding of climatic phenomena and their degree of predictability, but rather a lack of knowledge and understanding about how to transform this information into 'actionable climate knowledge

Parkes Agricultural Consultancy Pty Ltd was employed by Sundown Pastoral Company Pty Ltd to manage the farming enterprises at &quote;Keytah&quote; 38 kilometres west of Moree in July of 1997. It is to this enterprise that these proceedings relate. When I was initially asked to prepare a paper on this topic I thought it would be an easy assignment to relay what it is that we do to achieve consistently high yields. Endeavouring to be both precise and concise about the specifics of almost everything we do or have done over the past six years, is almost a contradiction in terms. I will, therefore, attempt to confine this paper to the overall management issues pertaining to our production, rather than getting into the complexities of what we are doing with varieties, plant spacing, nutrition, irrigation, field design, agronomy, cropping systems, etc. Whilst these are all exceptionally important in producing the most we can out of our farming system, the interests of time and space will not allow the detail required or these topics here. Further to this is the mass of information that we are all subject to at a conference of this nature and I, for one, have always struggled to ingest and digest the information that is directly relevant to me. Important things to me have always stuck in my mind better when referred to in an amusing or interesting way. So please forgive my indulgence in offering to you some of the &quote;Pearls of Wisdom&quote; that have assisted me in management over many years

The talks presented at the Beltwide cotton conference which will have the greatest impact on researchers, and the Australian cotton industry as a whole, will be the new transgenic insecticidal packages of MXB-13 from Dow Agroscience and VIP from Syngenta, along with the herbicide resistance packages of Roundup Ready Flex from Monsanto and LibertyLink from Bayer. While some of these products may never make up significant portions of the Australian cotton crop, others will. Hopefully in the next few years these products can be evaluated and the value of each to the Australian cotton industry be determined.

In terms of non-patentable concepts presented at the conference, the individual internode distance (IID), which was presented by Dr Tom Kirby from Delta & Pine land, may have a use for growers and consultants monitoring cotton crop development in Australia. Dr Kirby proposed a graph which showed the theoretical IID value at each stage of the crop's development. As crops became stressed the fell away from this curve (ie the IID became smaller). This could be a useful tool for Australian growers to identify a stress very shortly after it occurs and allow them to hopefully alleviate it before it is too late and yield adversely affected.

I don't believe that any information presented at the conference would have benefits specifically for the northern Australian cotton research project. Rather, the information is just as relevant to the traditional cotton growing areas in northern NSW and Queensland as it is to northern Australia. In particular, technology such as the insecticidal gene technologies should have a dramatic impact in both areas. I found the talks on cotton yield and yield composition the most relevant to my research and interests. As a result, there are other measurements related to yield composition in cotton, such as and possibly surface area, as well as the fruiting position that I will now be taking.

The past year has been a challenging one for the Cotton R&D Corporation. The appointment of five new Directors and a new Chair in November was possibly the most significant change the Corporation has seen since being established in October 1990. Despite this, and thanks to the efforts of Corporation staff and all directors new, continuing and retiring, the transition has been smooth. The Board is now looking forward to continuing to build the research program on the strong foundation developed during the past 10 years. The changes to the Board membership and advice from the Federal Government in December regarding revised priorities for rural Research and Development Corporations gave the Corporation an opportunity to revisit its major planning document, the Strategic Plan 1998-2003. Extensive consultation with industry has shown that the content of the Plan is sound and will deliver genuine benefits to the Australian cotton industry. In order to meet its obligations to all stakeholders, the Corporation has revised the structure of the Plan into a more clearly defined Outcome/Outputs framework. The revised framework will allow the Corporation to improve and simplify its planning and reporting. Australia’s cotton industry supports many thousands of people in rural and regional areas and directly contributes more than $1.5 billion to the national economy. Our role is to enable the industry to continue to be strong and profitable for the long-term, by addressing issues of natural resource management for sustainability, issues of production for profitability and issues of positive and negative off-farm impacts for the community. The Corporation remains focussed on reducing dependence on traditional pesticides, continuing the development of Integrated Pest Management principles, improving water use efficiency and developing of sustainable farming systems.

The overall aim of our work in this project was to develop optimum strategies for refuge crop management. In particular, the project aimed to : 1). Demonstrate the efficiency of coverage of Bt cotton by moths from on-cotton sources, and the degree of cross-mating of moths from different plant hosts; 2). Evaluate methods to enhance the production of Helicoverpa within refuge crops; 3). Continue monitoring of landscape-scale changes in the abundance of Helicoverpa spp.; 4) Conduct field trials to evaluate novel refuge crop options. The 4thaim was added to the project for its 3rd year, when Dr Mary Whitehouse joined the project from her previous work on mirid pest management

Fusarium wilt of cotton was first identified in Australia on the Darling Downs in 1993. The diseasehas now been found in most cotton producing areas in Queensland and New South Wales.-

Participation in the cotton industry to facilitate the adoption of IPM Facilitating the adoption of IPM through providing support to industry has been the key focus of this project. The project team has been involved in a wide range of activities that have, in combination, met this objective.

The latest development in the resourcing of the D&D program is the appointment of Regional Development Officers, who as the title suggests, have been appointed to the each of the major cotton growing valleys.

Australian cotton is grown in a relatively compact and contiguous part of the country. This delivers a number of efficiencies but also makes the industry relatively more susceptible to drought than, for example, grain crops grown in more diverse areas throughout the country, with major cotton regions often coming under the same weather pattern. Drought or marginal conditions prevailed over most, but not all, of the ‘cotton belt’ in the 2003–04 season. The gap between income and expenses is continually narrowing for Australian cotton growers, who face ever-increasing costs in many areas of production such as machinery (imported and thus sensitive to the rising value of the dollar) and water and freight costs. This makes the efficiency contributions from CRDC’s research and development program – efficiencies such as improved water use efficiency, lower chemical use and higher yield from improved varieties – vitally important to the continued economic sustainability of the industry Cotton’s excellent economic record and contribution has suffered a setback in the past two seasons because of the prolonged drought and the effects will be felt for the next two to three seasons. Increased efficiencies delivered by CRDC funded and coordinated research in 2003–04 and planned for 2004–05 will aid that recovery, particularly as the corporation’s Field to Fabric Initiative gathers momentum. In addition, the increased use of ever-improving Bollgard® II and Roundup Ready® varieties will continue to reduce the cost of insecticide and herbicide inputs to the crop, delivering economic, environmental and health dividends. THE 2004 HARVEST Despite some earlier concerns that the seasons conditions may cause problems with colour, fibre immaturity and neppiness (short, tangled fibres) in some regions, the quality of cotton has been good, with a significantly lower proportion falling into the discounted over-mature category than in the preceding drought-affected season. One notable feature of the season was that dryland crops (grown using only natural rainfall) in parts of the Darling Downs and the north-western slopes of New South Wales received excellent and timely rainfall, resulting in high yields and unprecedented quality premiums for a number of growers. Indications are that the 2004 cotton harvest should reach approximately 1.5 million bales, exceeding the 1.25 million bale forecast used as the basis of CRDC’s 2003–04 budget. Even with this revised figure, 2004 will see Australia’s smallest crop since the late 1980s, which means we will be unable to fulfill demand and risk losing some traditional key markets. This comes at a particularly unfortunate time for Australian cotton, with the United States and Brazil aggressively targeting those markets.