Managing sustainable cotton production is becoming more difficult with the ever-increasing demands for limited resources. To assist with management of cotton crops the Technology Resource Centre (TRC) of the Australian Cotton CRC aims to develop and distribute a range of decision support systems. Some of these systems are computerised eg. entomoLOGIC, nutriLOGIC, and hydroLOGIC, which all come under the banner of CottonLOGIC. The package is accepted as an industry standard for integrated pest management and is widely distributed and used across the industry (registered copies 785 Dec. 1998; currently 1177 Sep. 2002). However, supporting existing products, changing computer systems (eg. Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 and now Windows 98), increasing demands for other computerised decision support tools to be developed and demands by industry to investigate new opportunities (eg. GIS capabilities), have placed significant pressure on the resources of the TRC to meet these needs. Presently, one full time programmer is assigned to developing CottonLOGIC decision support tools, however, much of his time is dedicated in supporting and refining CottonLOGIC to meet users requirements.

Access to further programming support will allow some of the tasks that are necessary for continued progress of decision support to be completed and thus allow the benefits of these tools to be passed on to industry much quicker whilst maintaining support.