Cubbie more than doubles cotton plantings: boom year for water giant

Despite losing 30,000 megalitres of water to a storage breach last year, the nation’s biggest cotton farm has bounced back with a huge planting. Here’s how.

Cubbie Station’s 537,000 megalitres of on-farm dams are watering more than 21,000ha of cotton.

Australia’s biggest cotton farm, Cubbie Station, has almost tripled its plantings this season on the back of La Nina floods pouring into its 537,000 megalitres of on-farm dams.

Sentinel satellite images show the Macquarie Group’s farm managers have planted about 21,000ha of cotton this season, compared to about 8800ha in 2021-22.

Cubbie Station March 3, 2022.

Cubbie Station February 17, 2023.

The property’s vast cotton fields are watered by a shallow 20km-long dam complex that is 5km across at its widest point, covering a total area of about 8300ha.

The Macquarie Group declined to comment.

Cubbie Station awash with water on November 1, 2022.

Macquarie’s massive investment in this season’s crop comes despite a 3km wall on the station’s southeast storage breaching last September and spilling 30,000 megalitres of water across three production paddocks that contained bales of harvested cotton.

But the loss was insignificant, considering the scale of its storages.

ABARES has previously forecast Queensland’s cotton production will surge 8 per cent to 2 million bales (455,000 tonnes) this season.

The outlook further east on the Queensland-NSW border is just as good, with growers reporting they had planted as much as they could in the wake of water usage cutbacks.

Border Rivers Food and Fibre NSW vice-chairman Brendan Griffiths, who runs his own farm and is a consultant to others, said “this would be as close to full capacity as we can get”.

He said delivering a record crop, like that of 2016, was not feasible, due to water cutbacks and staff shortages.

“But we’re up by about 30 per cent here (on last season),” Dr Griffiths said.

In the Gwydir Valley, the local irrigators association executive officer Zara Lowien said wet conditions had meant it was very slow start to the season, with a lot of replanting.

Cotton Australia chief executive Adam Kay said overall cotton production was set to fall from 5.6 million bales last season to about 5.3mB this year, mainly due to floods across parts of the Macquarie, Lachlan and Murrumbigee Valleys.

“The Macquarie (growers) are doing about half of what they normally do,” Mr Kay said. “When I speak to farmers they say the crop is late and there’s been a lot of damage from phenoxy herbicide spray fallout.”