On The Road Again

I'm on the road again, this time a 1400 km round trip from Armidale to Moree and St George. It's all part of the Cotton CRC project about innovative small businesses in cotton-growing communities and the two towns named are leading cotton producing regions in Australia. In fact, Moree Plains Shire has the greatest value of agricultural production of any local government area in Australia, much of it cotton. And the St George region on the Balonne - Condamine river system has possibly the world's largest single cotton producing enterprise whose on farm water storage capacity is large in volume than the water in Sydney harbour!

I'm typing this message up in St George after travelling through some of the massive cotton properties dotting NW New South Wales and Southern Queensland. As an example of the scale of operations and their degree of mechanisation have a look at the attached photos. The first picture shows cotton ready for picking. This entire crop was irrigated by vast artificial reservoirs whose outline appears in the second photo.

The picking system is almost entirely automated using the type of machinery shown in the third exhibit. However, this type of equipment has recently been superseded by new machines whose labour efficiency is almost three times greater. This is typical of an industry that is the most capital and research intensive in Australia and mostly in the hands of large industrial scale enterprises. Consider this. The field shown in this photo is almost unimaginably large by European standards, and probably in the US too. By our estimates it is about 20 square km or roughly 7 square miles in size.

The picker takes about 90 or 95% of the cotton off the bushes, leaving the rest to be ploughed back into the soil and the crop is stored on board as it goes up and down the rows. Periodically, it stops to unload the cotton into large 'modules' - containers capable of handling up to 20 metric tonnes of raw cotton. Photos 4 and 5 show modules lining the edge of the field and the transfer process from picker to module. This process is currently occurring over much of northern NSW where the crop is surprisingly late. However, the picking has ended in St George where some of the ground is now being prepared for winter wheat.

AS