TWO noted Queensland farming families this year are celebrating 50 years of continuously growing cotton with the popularly-known ‘white gold’ crop clearly acknowledged for its significant contribution to the fortunes of Australian agriculture.
It’s been a remarkable journey for the Armstrong and Brimblecombe families who took their first tentative steps at growing an irrigated crop, spanning just one acre, to today’s sizeable operations that see many thousands of bales produced using the latest mechanisation systems.
It all started in 1959 when poor price returns for onions being grown in the Lockyer Valley, proved to be “the straw which broke the camel’s” back, according to Mal Armstrong who recalled how thousands of bags, once stored, had to be later thrown away.
Interestingly, that first cotton acre was grown and harvested by hand at Alan Brimblecombe’s Moira Farms enterprise at Forest Hill.
“He put that first irrigated acre in - to see how it would go and it was successful,” Mal Armstrong said. “So that was the beginning of it and we haven’t looked back.”
Former chairman of Queensland Cotton, Alan Brimblecombe, clearly remembers the hardships associated with growing that first irrigated acre at his Forest Hill property.
“I had a few friends come in to help me pick that first acre by hand – but they weren’t friends for long,” he laughed.
“It was pretty horrible and we vowed and declared that would be the only acre we would ever hand-pick.”
So the next year, 1960, when the operation was growing 60 acres, there was huge interest in the arrival of a single-row John Deere tractor-mounted picker.
From the big-picture perspective, however, it became obvious to the two families that the sometimes wet and often humid conditions associated with growing cotton in the Lockyer were impacting on crop quality, prompting the venture to be relocated west of the Divide with the close of the 1999 picking season signalling the end of cotton growing at Moira Farms.
Alan Brimblecombe sets great store on the contribution made by Australian plant breeders located at Narrabri and Wee Waa in NSW for “making the industry” what it is today.
The answer to the question “would you do it all again” is a resounding “yes”.
“Today, looking at the combined Armstrong and Brimblecombe families, and even with the limited water available today, we would still be producing in excess of 20,000 bales,” Mal Armstrong said.
“But there’s still a lot of misinformation, a lot of ignorance out there about cotton-growing,” he said.
“Today we can point to fields on the Downs where we have produced 500 bales from 120ML of water – so our output/megalitre has vastly improved over the years.”
In hindsight, both families say they can look back on their 50-year continuous, irrigated cotton growing venture with “enormous satisfaction and pride,” knowing their venture’s humble beginnings have resulted in making a significant contribution to Australia’s cotton growing industry.
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