n September 2006 the Namoi Catchment Management Authority (Namoi CMA) and

the Cotton Catchment Communities Cooperative Research Centre (Cotton CRC)

signed an umbrella agreement which would see them operate a partnership project

within the Namoi Catchment. Cotton Australia and the Cotton Cooperative Research

and Development (CRDC) were also brought in as partners of the project titled,

Schedule 1.2 'Supporting the adoption of Best Management Practice (BMP) in the

Cotton Industry in the Namoi Catchment'.The purpose of the prQject was to support the delivery and implementation of the

Australian Cotton Industry BMP program, in particular the Land and Water

Management Module in the Namoi Catchment and to foster better natural resource

management outcomes for the Namoi Catchment through the integration of the

principles of the Cotton BMP program and Namoi CMA catchment and management

targets defined in the Catchment Action Plan.The prQject employed a Cotton BMP Officer through the Cotton CRC and prqject

activities undertaken by the Officer during this prQject included property planning,

extension of on-farm best practice, workshops aimed at up skilling land managers and

increased communication between natural resource management bodies and industries

within the Namoi Catchment.

Expectations for industries to manage resources in a sustainable manner raise the question of how industries can demonstrate their sustainability credentials. This thesis reviews the question of sustainability monitoring and reporting in relation to the Australian cotton industry. Principals of sustainability reporting in business and agriculture were reviewed. A set of

sustainability indicators has been developed and economic, environmental and social data

compiled. A specific analysis of the cotton industry’s environmental management system, the

Cotton Best Management Practices program was completed to investigate its potential to track

and report farm management practice change over a 10 year period.

Key economic sustainability indicators include (Chapter 3): production area, yield, quality, gross

value, profitability and regional economic activity. Very good economic data is available about

the cotton industry, although it is not readily accessible for all stakeholders.

Key environmental sustainability indicators (Chapter 4) include soil, water, pesticide and

transgenic crop trait stewardship, biodiversity and greenhouse emissions. The cotton industry

has good data sets available from case studies and research reports for environmental

indicators. However, these generally give a ‘point in time’ picture rather than a long term trend

and are rarely industry wide. They are also often associated with the best producers, rather

than the “average” producer. There are very few data sets that can be used to track changes

over long periods of time. The BMP analysis showed it has great potential for monitoring long

term trends, which should be supplemented with some targeted and repeated surveys as

needed.

Key social sustainability indicators (Chapter 5) include education levels, demographics,

employment, health, community attitudes, social capital, research and development and

compliance with the law. There exists reasonable data relating to social indicators. This was an

unexpected finding as the gathering of social data is usually considered difficult for

sustainability reporting. A major gap is employment data, which is not well quantified either

for farms or the local service industries.

The analysis of the Cotton Best Management Practices (BMP) program farm practice audit

criteria for the 10 years between 1999 and 2008 shows that it is possible to identify and

quantify how cotton growers have implemented changes to a wide range of their farm

management practices (Chapter 6).

A preliminary water balance was carried out for the Maules Creek catchment to assist in the establishment of an appropriate conceptual model for the aquifer-river system. Interactions between streams in the Maules Creek catchment and the underlying aquifer were assessed and the available data on stream flow, groundwater abstractions and surface diversions was assembled. Estimates of evapotranspiration and crop-water use have been assembled and the areas under irrigation defined. The results of this study have implications for understanding the impacts of groundwater abstraction, such as more intermittent stream flow due to enhanced stream fed aquifer recharge, and for estimating the sustainable extraction of groundwater from the regional aquifer.

This project demonstrates one approach to coordinating and analysing hydrogeological data to help

with the evaluation of catchment water management issues. The methodologies presented in this

report are not intended to replace existing approaches to coordinating hydrogeological data being

used by NSW state government water management departments. Rather the applications presented

complement.

Four software programs are used for this project: MS Access, ArcGIS, Mathematica and FEFLOW.

MS Access (http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/default.aspx) is used to coordinate the data from the

NSW Water Information Pinneena Groundwater Works CD, which is the primary data set for the

bore construction details and the standing water level measurements. This information is combined

with other continuously recorded climatic data from the Bureau of Meteorology and the Pinneena

Continuous Flow CD into a single MS Access database.

ArcGIS (http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/index.html) is used to coordinate all the 2D spatial

information. Important information in this database includes the digital elevation model (DEM),

geological maps, soil maps, landuse maps and the stream network.

Mathematica (Wolfram Research, Inc., 2008, http://www.wolfram.com/) is used for the plotting and

analysis of the hydrograph data, for constructing the 3D conceptual site model of the catchment

hydrogeology, populating the FEFLOW (www.dhigroup.com) mesh, and the post processing of the

modelled groundwater hydrographs. The Mathematica notebooks developed for this project have

been coordinated under the name Crystallize. These notebooks are to be placed in the public

domain. To use the Mathematica notebooks requires the purchasing of a Mathematica license. The

hydrograph analysis applications described in this report could all be used on the web by running

the applications using Wolfram webMathematica3 (http://www.wolfram.com/).This would make

the information on the Pinneena CDs accessible to anyone in a visual format.

Only a few representative data analysis applications are presented, because there are numerous

aspects to coordinating the data for a catchment, and approaches to analysing the data are open

ended. The components that are presented demonstrate working with the databases, the workflow

for key aspects of constructing a conceptual 3D geological model of a catchment, and pre and post

processing information when using FEFLOW for the catchment water balance modelling.

A copy of the MS Access database, ArcGIS database, all the Crystallize notebooks (Mathematica

.nb files), supporting Excel files and a MS Word document version of the notebooks are located on

the accompanying USB memory stick. Below, the contents of the USB memory stick are described

in more detail.

This project sought to verify whether the Mein-Larson variant of the Green-Ampt infiltration equation could work for time-varying application rates using real-world moving sprinkler systems. This required laboratory testing of sprinkler equipment, computer modelling and field trials to verify the modelling. Field measurements of surface runoff were problematic, however, and ultimately no conclusive position could be arrived at.

The purpose of the funding was to co-fund a workshop entitled: Harnessing rhizosphere-soil-microbial interactions for increasing farm productivity and resilience of farming systems.

Soil health in combination with the use of efficient crop varieties that can harness rhizosphere and microbial interactions can increase farm productivity by up to 50%. Such an increase is essential to supply the increasing demand for food and fibre in the coming decades and to maintain profitability for farming businesses.

Verticillium dahliae is a highly destructive fungal pathogen that causes an annual global product loss in cotton of 20%. Currently there are no effective treatments for verticillium wilt, but bioinoculants might provide an environmentally friendly solution. This project aimed to: develop methods to study the interactions between the cotton plant Gossypium hirsutella, the pathogen V. dahliae and a rhizopheric competent fungal symbiont, Beauveria bassiana. To quantify root colonisation by the pathogen and/or symbiont in single or multiple inoculations, and to identify patterns in peptides secreted by the plant, pathogen and symbiont during single or multiple inoculations. Soil was replaced by vermiculite and the plants were cultivated using Hoagland’s nutrient solution allowing complete control over their nutrient availability and uptake. This study found that there was no significant difference in the susceptibility of two cotton cultivars Sicot F-1 and Siokra 1-4. Results indicated that pre-infection with B. bassiana cause no interference with V. dahliae’s ability to colonises and infect the plants. B, bassiana did however supress the infection of a contaminating unidentified Aspergillus. Post-infection of B. bassiana did have a significant effect on the colony forming units of V. dahliae when it was introduced as a pre-infection, this interaction also occurred when the fungi’s roles were reversed. A significant difference in peptide secretion profiles was observed when comparing UV chromatographs from different treatments.

CRDC and Cotton Australia co-fund membership for the cotton industry in the Primary Industries Education Foundation of Australia (PIEFA). PIEFA's mission is to engage and inform students, teachers and the broader community about the role and importance of primary industries in the Australian economy, environment and wider community, and the career opportunities available through the primary industries and along the chain of supply of food and fibre products.

PIEFA's Objectives:

provide national leadership and coordination of initiatives to encourage primary industries education in schools through a partnership between industry, government and educators;

commission, coordinate, facilitate and manage national projects to encourage primary industries education in schools;

provide a source of credible, objective and educational resources for schools to maintain and improve community confidence in Australia's primary industries; and

communicate primary industries research and development outcomes in a format accessible for schools and encourage interest from schools in primary industries related careers.

PIEFA operates and manages a web portal for teachers called Primezone. Primezone provides teachers with a one stop shop to access a range of high quality primary industries education resources from Foundation to year 12, all linked to the Australian curriculum.

Visit Primezone at www.primezone.edu.au

This project represents continued fundingof the membershifor the Primary Industries Education Foundation of Australia (PIEFA) for the 2015/2016 financial year. Based on a review of the value of PIEFA membership for the Cotton Industry after our fourth year of membership, Cotton Australia can confidently recommend continued funding. For a full account of that review please see the attached document.

In our view, PIEF are adding value to our work and that of the industry (education and also the RD&E). In short:

 Offering exceptional value for money delivering far beyond the 50K co-investment of the cotton industry.

 PIEFA are supporting collaboration across industries the education sector, government and the primary industries

 PIEFA provide advice, networks and manpower in respect to resources development.

 They are an established go-to point of contact for those seeking input from primary industries in general on education issues

 PIEFA add value through their policy and advocacy work

The cotton sector has prioritised workforce development for strategic investment by setting human capacity building as a goal and defining a strategy to plan for future industry capacity needs. This strategy reflects an understanding that effective workforce development is important for a sectors competitiveness and innovation. However workforce development is not straightforward, particularly for primary industries, where there are a relatively large number of individual businesses that on their own cannot influence the organisation and activities of training organisations or employment services providers, or even necessarily offer a broad range of career opportunities within their own businesses. Therefore to ensure there are enough people of appropriate capacity to meet the demands and needs of the Australian cotton sector in the medium term, collective action by the organisations that influence or have a stake in human capacity is required. To take effective action however required:

a. an understanding of the current system of how people are attracted, retained and developed in the sector and what is currently working and why,

b. a framework to assess, prioritize, align, plan, invest and act to improve how workforce development happens over time.

c. confidence to act strategically and collaboratively in this domain.

This includes both what individual businesses can do to develop their workforce – but also what collective industry action can do.

Research in workforce development has identified that to improve the contribution of human capacity to a sectors’ competitiveness a multi-dimensional response is required. This means that people need to be simultaneously deployed more effectively in the production system, developed to meet new challenges and provided with interesting work and career opportunities. Further, this is understood to only be achieved with due consideration to the particularities of local communities and regional economies in designing effective support systems. The issues of attracting, retaining and developing people in a sector then is far from solved simply by generating knowledge about skill needs, clever marketing strategies to attract people or developing and delivering training products. What is required is effective workforce development across the supply chain requiring both an understanding of the workforce development system and a capacity to improve it.

This project activated the cotton sector strategy and addressed these challenges by establishing a research-based process to:

a) collect and interpret regionally specific data and information about how cotton workforce development happens and what is currently working well or could be improved. This includes building an information system on the diversity of job and skill profiles of farm and off farm businesses through the supply chain in a rapidly changing production environment, the way people are attracted, retained and developed in the sector; the demand for people and skills, regional labour market analysis, and the different roles and contributions of stakeholders like employers, training organisations, employment organisations and government in the cotton workforce system;

b) engage key stakeholders, including those outside the sector, in understanding the workforce development system to identify potential partnerships for local action;

c) develop a regionally relevant framework to mobilise and support networks of employers and relevant stakeholders in 2-3 regions in planning to improve workforce development.

Overall, the CRDC Innovative Work project has increased the confidence of cotton stakeholders to act to improve cotton workforce development. This project has also advanced knowledge on the nature of workforce challenges in agriculture, particularly associated with new technologies, post-drought recovery and the experience of work by employees and human resource practices of employers.

This research project acts as a pilot study and involved four trials in the Riverina region of New South Wales comparing establishment, growth rates, plant maturity and yield between cotton crops grown under plastic and conventionally grown cotton. It is hypothesized that crops grown under plastic will have better establishment, increased growth rates and earlier maturity with no loss of yield.

Sporadic significance was found when comparing establishment and yield, with establishment typically lower (6.2%) when grown under plastic and the most significant increase in yield found at one farm equating to a 2.8 bale/ha increase. Overall trends suggest there could be some benefit in using plastic film on cotton crops in this region in terms of growth rate and maturity. Both node production and reduction in nodes above white flower occurred earlier and faster in all crops grown under plastic.

UNE 1501 – ‘ Phosphorus availability in raingrown cotton’, was conducted at ‘Colonsay’, via Brookstead, on the Darling Downs in Queensland, at a long term nutrition site, owned and maintained by Incitec Pivot for 30 years. The experiment was conducted in raingrown cotton cv SICOT 74 BRF.

At this experimental site, phosphorus had been applied to the same plots at the rates of 0, 10, and 20kg/ha P each year since the commencement of the experiment. For the 2015 experiment, the existing 50m plots were then split into three treatments to include the addition of deep applied P, applied at 20kg/ha to 20cm depth on 50cm spacing, and a tillage treatment to disperse any bands of enriched nutrient. Work by Bell et.al. 2015, and Dorahy 2004, has shown little response in cotton, in terms of yield or plant nutrient uptake, to the application of fertiliser P in the season that it is applied. This experiment provided the researchers with a unique set of circumstances where the soil had been enriched with P such that a gradient of background soil test values was achieved. In this particular experiment very good results with respects to both plant phosphorus uptake, and yield were achieved. Colwell P values in the 20kg/ha P treatments had been enriched to 64 mg/kg in the surface, whilst the 0 kg/ha P treatments were at around 8.6 mg/kg (Colwell), and had remained relatively unmoved for the duration of the Incitec Pivot experiment (30 years). The 20 kg/ha P treatments showed maximum plant P uptake of approximately 32 kg/ha, the yield being 7.92 ba/ha. The uptake in the 0 kg/ha P treatments was around 18 kg/ha in the plant tissue, with a yield of 5.62 ba/ha. It is not perfectly clear as to the mechanism driving these responses although it is postulated that the favourable early season growing conditions resulted in excellent surface root activity, or that soil enriched with P behaves differently than that with fertiliser P applied for that growing season, or a combination of both.

When looking at the response curve comparing yield and soil test Colwell P values, it appears as if the critical level, for cotton, using Colwell P ( 0-10cm) may be around 25 mg/kg, significantly higher than the accepted 6 mg/kg.

Very little response was observed when both deep applied P was added or when tillage was included to disperse bands of enhanced P. This may concur with other work by Wang et.al. 2007, and McLaren et.al. 2013, inferring that deeper in the profile the plant is likely to be drawing on native, and other residual reserves of P held in a range of P pools, and again that applied fertiliser P ( as the deep applied P ) is unlikely to provide a short term response in terms of either plant P uptake, or yield. Because of the favourable early season root activity in this particular experiment, it was difficult to distinguish differences in nutrient taken up from soil containing dispersed P, or soil containing P held in a band.

Plant tissue testing using the youngest mature leaf, still provides a valid basis for assessing in-crop P status in cotton. The reliability decreases after peak flowering, as plants partition plant P in to maturing fruiting bodies, and seed.