The Menindee and Lower Darling CGA in conjunction with Tandou Ltd sought to develop linkages with local high schools, community and industry, with the following intentions:

Be a link between the grower, community and industry,promote cotton production as a sustainable and responsible industry,

and be a source of information for members and the community.

We do this by supporting events that are going on in our community and educating people within our district about the cotton industry, as well as promoting ourselves, what we do, our growers and anything else that we have to offer.     

In 2014, three key aspects were developed

This project has three key aspects that we aimed to deliver on:

1. To continue our work with two trainee students from Menindee Central School in terms of completing their traineeships and helping to get them job ready through training and/or the purchasing of equipment for the future careers. This programme encourages students to finish year 11 and year 12 as well as continuing with further education whether it be in the form of a trade or further formal studies.

2. Getting local school students and community member to the lake to get a first-hand experience of a cotton farm, as well as to learn about agriculture in general. This exposes people for within our community (Menindee and Broken Hill) as well as further away (Mildura, Riverland etc.) to the farm and what we do. There is always a focus to senior school students to help show them all of the career options that are available in cotton but we welcome anyone with open arms.

3. Educating and promoting the general public on the cotton industry and specifically our grower, Lake Tandou. This is commonly done by supporting local events either through time, equipment or money and representing the CGA at these events where possible.

Deep drainage (DD) - water that passes beyond the root zone - is an important process in irrigated cropping soils to ensure leaching of salts through the soil profile to deeper soil layers, the vadose zone (the zone between the rootzone and the watertable) or to groundwater. Salt can either be naturally present within some soils or be added through low quality irrigation water. Furthermore, excessive DD may cause water table rise to the rootzone with associated salts, so precluding the growth of salt sensitive species.DD is also an economic negative, as costs of pumping and storage are not realised in increased yields or possible increased area under production. The loss of irrigation waters to DD is particularly important in drought years where the rare water resource must be carefully utilised to ensure crops attain maximum yield per unit volume of applied water.The study reported here focused on DD water losses and the quality of those lost waters (in terms of salinity) on 7 irrigated cotton farms (all but one under traditional furrow irrigation management) in the upper Murray Darling basin (UMDB) near the towns of Boggabilla (2 sites), Dalby, Goondiwindi, Macalister, Pampas and St George.Many regarded the advent of low volume irrigation devices (eg lateral moves) with their known capacity to increase water use efficiency (bales of cotton/unit water applied) as a &quote;win win&quote; situation; making minimum water go further, particularly as DD is almost zero. However, minimal or no DD equates to a reduced leaching fraction. This in turn can lead to a potential for increased rootzone salinity.This project commenced in 2008 and monitored DD across irrigated cropping lands in the UMDP. There were 7 sites with lysimeters installed (each a commercial, irrigated cotton field) giving a total of 21 lysimeters. At each site, a lysimeter was installed near the head ditch, mid field and tail ditch in each field. One of these sites was irrigated with a lateral move and the remaining 6 with traditional furrow irrigation. One of the 6 furrow irrigated fields immediately adjoined the lateral move site, facilitating comparison of the two irrigation techniques in terms of DD. The water quality (salinity level) of all DD leachates was monitored at all sites. Several hydrological models were tested, to investigate their capacity to predict DD.Lastly, monitoring continued of the 16 &quote;wet&quote; inspection bores in the St George irrigation area (SGIA) to investigate their continuing dynamics and links withsurface water events. Principal results were:(i) In 2008-09, DD was collected only at the Macalister site under a rainfed barley crop; all other sites being fallow. Five sites (including the lateral move site) were irrigated in 2009-10 with DD values up to 104 mm measured, though most values were <20 mm and the lateral move (as always) being zero. All sites were under irrigated cotton in 2010-11 (high cotton prices) but DD collected were very low (all <12 mm) showing the incidence of very few irrigation events at all sites because of good and frequent in-season rains.(ii) The DD data and related soil Chloride sampling under the lateral move and in the adjoining furrow irrigated field suggest salt build-up under the lateral, due to the lack of DD (ie no leaching fraction). It is emphasised that the chloride data sets to date are small and sampling will continue in both fields to mid-2013 (just before a new Project ends) to assess further these soil chloride trends.(iii) As found previously, the EC of the leachates collected in the lysimeter collection bottles continued to be far greater than the EC of the irrigation waters applied to each field. This is seen as highlighting the potential for adverse off-site effects of poor water quality from DD. The maximum increases (60 fold) continued to occur at the St George site.(iv) Testing of the four hydrological models (SODICS, HowLeaky?, SaLF and SIRMOD/FAO-56) provided results at variance to the lysimeter-measured, DD values. The simulated outputs, though based on field collected parameters, had no relation to the magnitude, or seasonal or in-field trends of the lysimeter DD data. More work is required to fully investigate these anomalies. In particular, the simulations may benefit from more detailed inputs of evapotranspiration, rain and irrigation volumes that better reflect seasonal variability of irrigated cotton production.(v) Groundwater dynamics of the 16 &quote;wet&quote; inspection boreholes in the SGIA have been monitored since 1972 by manual dipping and since early 2007, by loggers set to log water levels on a 12 h interval. In the early to mid 1980s, the groundwater level in 50% of all the 16 wet inspection bores rose a range of 0.5 to 19 m towards the ground surface. Though these rises could have many causative factors, local growers linked them to the filling of on-farm water storages at approximately that time. These water levels have generally stayed at these elevated levels. Importantly, the water levels and their dynamics of the wet inspection bores illustrate more localised (small) groundwater mounds, rather than a broad groundwater mound under the SGIA. Two of the boreholes with the shallowest water levels showed a distinct rise in level, associated with the heavy rains and floods of March 2010 and January 2011. This result illustrates the continuing connectivity between surface water events and groundwater levels, at least for shallow, unconfined aquifers in the SGIA.

The project's prime aim was the direct quantification of DD across a wide, yet representative range of cotton soils and management systems, while concurrently assessing both salt balances of collected leachates and around-lysimeter soils, as well as crosschecking the measured DD data with less expensive, indirect methods of predicting DD. Secondly, to monitor irrigation efficiencies in terms of recent technology utilisation in the cotton industry

This report builds on and applies the first three stages of the study, Exploring Between Community Resilience & Irrigated Agriculture in the MDB,1 to address the following questions:What are likely to be the social and economic impacts of changes production due to permanent reductions in irrigation water for different communities at different geographic scales?What factors are likely to mitigate or exacerbate impacts arising from reduction in irrigation water?How might communities be assisted to respond to such changes?

I attended the International Cotton Genomics Initiative meeting in Brazil on 18,19, 20 September, 2006. I replaced Curt Brubaker who, because he had left CSIRO, was unable to attend. This meeting was attended by approximately 200 cotton molecular researchers world-wide.

I presented our work on microarray analysis of genes involved in early fibre development as a plenary talk. My presentation included work done by the CRDC funded Post Doc and formerly a PhD student, Adriane Machado. As well as presenting our work a further aim of this travel was to participate in any efforts to initiate sequencing of the Cotton Genome, make contacts and learn about work going on in other parts of the work, particularly genes involved in controlling cotton fibre parameters, but also, generally, cotton molecular biology. My presentation on our work was well received. Our work is progressing well and other laboratories, particularly those in China and the US, are also making big efforts in molecular biology to identify genes important for fibre development. As an international effort, we are attempting to correlate fibre phenotypes with molecular markers and, ultimately, genes. A cross between hirsutum and the barbadense lines has been made to and continued selfing to the F5 generation. These recombinant inbred lines (RILs) are now having the cotton fibre phenotype determined. Marker analysis of these lines is now undersay using SSLP DNA markers. In this way cotton fibre genetic characters (QTLs) will be linked to molecular markers. We are participating in this project with colleagues from France, Belgium and the USA. We will identify genes that are highly expressed in the lines showing superior cotton fibre phenotypes. Scientists involved in this project also met at the ICGI conference and planned the next steps.

The major development from this meeting was the decision to proceed with an attempt to develop a genome sequencing project for cotton. I was elected as one writing committee member on an eight-member committee; Danny Llewellyn is one of approximately fifty consulting members. We have written a draft white paper (attached) outlining the important outcomes for cotton breeding and cotton research with a complete cotton genome sequence. These include enhancing our understanding of fibre, growth and development, the effects of polyploidisation and the practical development of DNA markers for cotton breeding. The topic of cotton genome sequencing has been discussed at several meetings including previous research conferences held by ICGI. At the Brazil meeting there was strong support for organising a community effort on cotton genome sequencing. At the end of this meeting there was a decision to proceed with developing a proposal for cotton genome sequencing which can be supported world-wide.

Allocations of river and groundwater have been traditionally treated separately in Australia and many other parts of the world even though in many regions groundwater and river systems are hydraulically connected. Groundwater extractions in areas where river systems are hydraulically connected can cause substantial impacts to river flows particularly base flows or low flows, which are considered to be ecologically important.

Traditional groundwater modelling approaches tend to be undertaken on time scales of weeks or months which are not sufficient to demonstrate the impacts of groundwater extractions in many river systems, particularly where flows are ephemeral. This research considers the impacts of groundwater extraction on surface water flows using a simple conceptual modelling approach called IHACRES_GW. The Cox’s creek catchment in the Namoi river basin, Australia is

used as a case study. The research effectively demonstrates that groundwater extractions are having significant impacts on baseflows in this area and that current policies will not be effective in reducing these impacts. The research also demonstrates the potential of such an approach to be used in conjunction with traditional groundwater models when setting allocation limits and considering sustainable groundwater yields.

The application of the IHACRES_GW model in the Cox’s Creek subcatchment demonstrated that groundwater extraction affects the frequency, timing and magnitude of baseflow events, and that the impacts vary not only as a consequence of the extraction rates and other losses to groundwater storage, but also according to the groundwater recharge rates. The legacy that historical rates of extraction have on overall groundwater storage volumes and associated baseflow discharges is a function of the net recharge to the exploited aquifer system versus loss as a consequence of extraction and other groundwater losses. It can take decades or

longer to recharge aquifers to pre-drought storage levels if groundwater resources have been heavily and/or overly exploited. Conversely, during wetter climatic periods, particularly when associated with flooding and increased groundwater recharge, groundwater storages may be replenished within a relatively short time. Although groundwater recharge rates are not required for estimating sustainable pumping rates, they are critical for an accurate assessment of groundwater-river interactions and sustainability assessments.

Application of the IHACRES_GW model to the Cox’s creek catchment has been able to show that the estimated sustainable yields of 7,200 ML for zone 2 and 18,600 ML/yr for the combined zone 2 and zone 9, covering the entire Cox’s creek catchment are likely to have significant impacts on surface water resources in the area. The lower limit in zone 2 is likely to reduce baseflows by 6,000 ML/yr and lead to slower recoveries of the river system following drought periods. The model shows that for extraction rates greater than 9,000 ML/yr the groundwater and surface water systems would be permanently disconnected. It suggests that a limit of between 7,000 and 8,000 ML/yr across the whole subcatchment (including both zone 2 and zone 9) would be most appropriate.

If results of this research were to be adopted by government the outcomes for irrigation industries are likely to be variable. In some areas this could mean reduced groundwater allocations, particularly during dry periods, although this is likely to be offset in other parts of the industry by increased surface water availability and improved capacity of the river system to recover from drought. It is possible that some impacts could be offset by allowing greater surface water access, although the nature of impacts from such a scheme would need to be tested.

Meeting opened with Axel Dreiling’s presentation of results from CSITC 7001-1

round trial. I have attached following reports:

• Explanation. PDF (explanation of results)

• RT7001-1 General Lab. PDF (results of all labs)

Information data was accepted by committee.

Other reports I have not attached as follows:

• Evaluation of individual lab for each instrument

• Certificates (New addition. One certificate for participation for each labs

instrument and one certificate providing evaluation result for each labs

instrument.

There were 55 labs that participated and 70 instruments. This compares to 40 labs

and 46 instruments for pilot trial 2. CSITC are hoping for 58 labs and 76 instruments

for the next trial. Only 2 Australian labs and 4 instruments participated in CSITC

7001-1 trial. The main reasons why only 2 labs participated are machine problems,

holidays and labs closing down for off season.

Performance details in Final Report

The key purpose of this Primary Industry Health and Safety Partnership strategic plan is to guide the R&D activities supported by the Farm Health and Safety Joint Research Venture over the next 5 years in

the effort to prevent injury on farms. The Joint Venture is coordinated by the

Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) and funded

with the support of a range of other organisations including Grains Research

& Development Corporation, Meat & Livestock Australia, Sugar Research &

Development Corporation, Cotton Research & Development Corporation and

Australian Wool lnnovations Pty Ltd.

Snapshot of the FiveYear Plan

Vision

The vision presents the ideal view of the world that will be achieved not only

through the R&D program but also the efforts of the industry and government

agencies promoting OHS and the effort of individual farmers in adopting safe

systems of work.

Enhanced well being and productivity in rural industries through improved

OHS status of Australian agriculture delivered by the establishment of safe

systems of work on farms.

Mission

To coordinote and support R&D to develop, implement, monitor and evaluate

safe systems of work on farms across all rural industries.

Objectives

I. To increase the adoption of safe systems of work on farms

2. To develop the information and systems to ensure the health and safety

of persons transporting, handling, applying and otherwise affected by

agricultural and veterinary chemicals

3. To complete on-farm safety management packages for all major

commodities including horticultural industries and encourage their

incorporation into broader farm management packages

4. To update and further develop training material and delivery modes more

likely to be taken up by farmers

5. To maintain, support and utilise the collection of data on farm health and

safety issues

I would like to report on CSITC results for the 2nd pilot trial and the benefits to CCAA Classing Facilities to continue in this program.

This report outlines the results of surveys conducted by of their

membership and cotton growers from across the production valleys in eastern Australia.

Results from the grower survey show that overall, Bollgard RR was the gene stack that was planted most by

survey respondents, at 60.6 per cent of cotton planted, with Bollgard next at 24 per cent. However, this

varied by region, with Bollgard RR varieties making up 81.4 per cent of the surveyed cotton area in the

Southern zone, and only 36.8 per cent in the Northern zone (where Bollgard was higher at 47.9 per cent).

Conventional and Conventional RR varieties made up only 15.8 per cent of the total cotton area planted by

survey respondents. Conventional RR varieties were highest in the Southern zone, at 12.5 per cent (5.8 per

cent being the overall mean).

Forecasts of future variety mix by respondents showed a slight increase in the percentage of Bollgard

varieties to be planted in the upcoming 2006-2007 season. Significant increases in Bollgard plantings

included the Border Districts zone (up from 22.8 per cent to 32.4 per cent of all varieties planted), while

Bollgard RR gains were most significant in the Southern zone (up from 81.4 per cent to 92.7 per cent).

Overall, all Bollgard varieties (Bollgard and Bollgard RR), were predicted to increase as a percentage of the

total cotton crop planted from 84.6 per cent to 89.9 per cent for the sample in the survey.

Growers were also grouped in terms of their attitude to whether they considered using Roundup Ready

varieties “better in their situation” than over-the-top (OTT) herbicides. This analysis showed that growers

responding to the survey, who agreed with the statement, grew a higher percentage of RR cotton, were

younger and had been involved with cotton production for less time than other growers. These same

growers were larger employers, and had a larger percentage of their irrigation supply from ground-water

sources.

As in previous surveys of consultants the relative control of weeds in low pressure fields was considered

best where RR technology was employed in conjunction with a conventional herbicide program. A similar

outcome was recorded for those fields with high pressure whereby the combination of Roundup Ready

technology and a conventional herbicide program received the highest ranking in aggregate. A majority of

consultants were uncertain as to whether RR cotton showed a difference in yield with a slightly larger

percentage of respondents (18.9%) noting a decrease in yield as opposed to the 13.5 per cent who observed

a yield increase. A higher proportion of respondents also ranked the economic performance of RR

technology higher on high weed pressure fields in aggregate to that experienced where RR was employed

on low weed pressure fields.

A small number of respondents reported having some experience with Roundup Ready Flex technology.

Comments from these consultants suggest that pricing issues associated with the new technology’s

introduction will be important as they asses performance in future seasons. Comments on the expected

advantages and disadvantages of RR Flex were well contributed. The responses indicate that there is a

wide spectrum of opinions surrounding how RR Flex may perform, suggesting that until more commercial

results are available, consultants will be unsure of which applications of the technology will deliver greatest

value to growers.

I

ntegrated weed management and the issue of herbicide resistance was a constant theme in many of the

comments contributed by consultants. Consultants and growers know the benefits that have accrued during

the period during which Roundup Ready varieties have been available to the industry. Similarly, these crop

managers are concerned about the long-term viability of their weed management strategies and the need to

have a number of methods available to combat this constant threat to production. The advent of Roundup Ready Flex will present the industry with a range of alternative approaches to weed management, it will be in the industry’s long-term benefit to closely monitor the changes to on-farm management and weed spectrums that occur as a result.