The Healthy HeadWaters Water Use Efficiency (HHWUE) project is helping Queensland Murray-Darling Basin irrigators invest in more efficient irrigation systems and technologies that reduce water loss and deliver long-term economic benefits. It is also returning a share of water savings to the Basin's rivers, wetlands and floodplains

The Cotton Industry needs to demonstrate that its practices are sustainable (and communicate this to the community and government). Sustainability involves an understanding of economic, environmental and social attributes. This project compiles these attributes into a one stop shop

Water use is an important and well researched issue in the cotton industry. However, there is growing interest worldwide in water use throughout the product supply chain, covering not only production, but also manufacturing and use. At the farm level, water use can be determined using a water balance, but there is still a need to aggregate data across the whole supply chain using a specialist approach. To do this, there are two main supply chain water assessment methods; water footprinting (WF) and life cycle assessment (LCA). A recent review of these methods for CRDC concluded that LCA is the most robust and useful method for conducting supply chain water use assessments in the Australian cotton industry for a number of reasons.

The aim of this new 3 year project is to map the Australian cotton industry and to catalogue the extent of cotton research

This season's results show the potential for damage to cotton crops from resdues of Hussar, Intervix, Spinnaker and Lontrel, with reductions in plant stand, seedling vigour, crop development and yield recorded. Cotton growers need to ensure the reccomended plant-back periods for these and other residual herbicides are observed.

irrigated systems using solid, single-skip and double skip configurations to a fully irrigated solid crop Irrigations were scheduled using NAWF with the aim to keep the crop in the partially irrigated system flowering as long as possible to take advantage of any in-crop rainfall where three irrigations were available or to finish the crop off where only one was planned The season was characterised by a very wet start and dry finish, with less ability for the partially irrigated treatments to capture rainfall than in a more typical year The solid, fully irrigated crop yielded over 12.5 bales/ha but the single-skip semi-irrigated had a respectable yield of 8.65 bales/ha with better irrigation water use efficiency Difficult to make conclusions about these systems from one year's data and more research is needed to determine the potential of the single-skip semiirrigated system (or others) in a partially irrigated production system

Mobile devices are everywhere. Smart phones are more than just something to make calls with, and tablets have revolutionised the way that we work and play. A library worth of books can be stored and read on mobile devices and it is changing the format in which information is shared. The Cotton D&D Team is working to bring our library of resources to your phone or tablet as electronic publications and apps.

Tocal College has been working closely with the cotton industry since 2006 to deliver skills development and accreditation programs. This has ranged from Certificate II Skill Sets for jobseekers in Moree to Diploma level qualifications - including the development of the Cotton BMP Accredited Manager program. In all of these projects, Tocal College has worked with the cotton industry to find innovative and flexible ways of using competencies and qualifications to drive human capacity developments. This paper will outline and discuss this process and present some current developments.

Dryland cotton is often grown using skipped rows because of variable summer rainfall. Skip configurations are used to: increase the amount of soil-water available for the crop especially during flowering, which can influence the potential lint yield and quality; reduce the level of variability or risk associated with production; and reduce input costs. Expansion of production into new areas and the need for flexibility in farm equipment setup has meant there are more alternative configurations to the traditional single and double skip configurations. Super single (1 present, 2 skipped) may be suitable where rainfall is considered too low for profitable double skip production, while alternate row (1 present, 1 skipped) configurations are being considered instead of double skip to take advantage of equidistant spacing to improve yield and quality. This paper presents the latest summary of research comparing the yield potential of different dryland configurations. This information can be used in conjunction with other factors such as costs, fibre quality, climate, cropping history and equipment availability

Australia's highly mechanised agriculture, energy (diesel & electricity) represents a major cost for growers. Energy assessments can offer individual growers significant savings in their energy costs, up to 30% in some cases. An appropriate measurement protocol and benchmarked figures will underpin tools that allow growers to evaluate their own energy performance and identify potential savings