‘A year to forget’: Riverina cotton harvest a disappointment

As a delayed cotton harvest gets underway in the Riverina, growers say it has been “a year to forget”.

Gavin Dal Broi on his property "Terrawarra", at Bringagee, NSW. Picture: Yuri Kouzmin

Across the southern NSW Riverina, tens of thousands of hectares of cotton plants covered in fluffy white bolls give the appearance of an abundant season.

But there is a problem: anyone who stops to look closely will see that among the internal branches of the plants, large bolls are stunted or missing.

For Carathool grower and RivCott chairman Gavin Dal Broi, this season has been “a year to forget”.

“If you’re driving past a cotton crop, it looks beautiful and white … until you get the cotton picker in there,” he said.

“Normally a cotton plant has a lot of its money-making cotton in the middle of the plant. Whereas this year, we don’t have that.”

Late last year, a 30-day planting window was reduced to just three days due to heavy rain. Then cold weather stunted early fruit.

During the warm summer that followed, plants tried to compensate by putting all their fruit on later-developed, outside branches.

As cotton pickers approach the halfway point in a delayed harvest, Mr Dal Broi said some growers were faced with well-below-average yields.

“It looks perfect … and all of a sudden (what looks like a) 13-bale crop is only doing 10,” he said.

Gavin Dal Broi on his property near Carathool in NSW. Picture: Yuri Kouzmin

As chairman of the local cotton gin, Mr Dal Broi gets a bird’s eye view of not just his own crop, but also a lot of the cotton that is delivered around the Riverina town of Griffith.

“Yields I’ve heard in the region range from about 11 (bales per hectare) down to four bales,” he said.

“The crop that we got in early is looking okay. But any crop that was either re-sown or planted late is really, really bad yielding.”

On his own property, Mr Dal Broi decided to pull out 360ha of a 600ha crop when he saw plants struggling. He replaced it with corn.

Many other growers had made similar decisions, and as a result, the RivCott cotton gin was expecting to process about 55 per cent of what it would in a normal year, he said.

Hillston grower and Southern Valleys Cotton Growers Association chairman Paul Cleton said it was a similar story in his area, with yields well below what growers had hoped for.

On his property, yields were averaging 9-10 bales per hectare with about 30 per cent of the crop picked. In a normal year, he would budget based on yields of 12 bales/ha, he said.

Across the country, other cotton-growing regions have fared better than the Riverina, experiencing relatively favourable conditions. Cotton Australia has forecast a national 5.2 million bale crop in 2023, not far below last year’s record 5.5 million bale crop.