Macintyre Downs is a 3500 hectare irrigation property along 15km of the northern side the Macintyre River, bordering NSW, west of Goondiwindi. As a family cotton growing business, our goals have always been to maximise profit with the best management we knew to employ. We have, as a result found ourselves now developing a system of management which takes us towards our goals for healthy profitable fanning, which could be labelled as 'Biological'. Becoming Biological Farmers was certainly not on our To Do list, whereas finding better ways to farm certainly was after some disappointing results with traditional management systems. The catalyst for us, in terms of investigating alternatives practices, was the aftermath of a particularly torrid cotton season in the late 90's, in which we were forced to re-evaluate practices after what we would consider unsustainable insect pressures and associated chemical use.