2 July 2008
Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry - Tony Burke
Manager and director of the Australian Cotton Growers Research Association - Paul McVeigh
Tony: G’day, it’s Tony. I’m out at Paul McVeigh’s place out at Dalby in Queensland. He’s been a cotton farmer for how long now?
Paul: 28 years, Tony.
Tony: 28 years and not a bad example—we’ve arrived at the wrong time in terms of harvest , but the thing that is a real difference here is the difference in chemical use here you would have found going back today to 20 years ago. How often would you have been using chemical fertilis—chemicals and pesticides before?
Paul: before the introduction of Bollgard Tony, look we’d spray everything from 12 to 15 times in a season to combat [inaudible] nowadays we don’t spray at all for [inaudible].
Tony: Ok, so and that would’ve been you would have still found that in the soil by now?
Paul: Oh yeah you would have done Tony. Some of those soil insecticides had a long residual but nowadays we’ve been growing cotton up round our houses where we’ve never ever grown cotton before, and it’s such an easy crop to grow now.
Tony: And those key changes would be a lot to do with GMO?
Paul: It’s been the biggest factor by a long way, it’s (inaudible) it’s probably 80% of the change, the other side has been actually the management of our farming techniques as well, but it’s been a revolution.
Tony: And what do you see as the key things for the future?
Paul: Obviously the key one is water management.
Tony: Yeah?
Paul: Yeah oh that’s the biggest challenge I think whether you’re a cotton farmer or a grazier it’s managing your water and managing your farming systems and the soil now obviously. So we’re doing a lot of work in minimising out the soil disturbance, zero till machines you can see over there, and just trying to actually enhance our capacity to store water in the off season.
Tony: Well, it’s a technology (inaudible) I’ve been saying for a while now it’s not the be all and end all but dealing with climate change and dealing with drought, it’s going to be one piece of a jigsaw we’re going to be looking at.
Paul: Tony, the window of opportunity for GMO I think we’ve only just scratched the surface. Now we’re more (inaudible) genes coming through, potentially way down the track there might even be a nitrogen fixation gene that we can actually attach to the (inaudible) any crop. So we’re pretty excited about the future, it’s a bit challenging at the moment but the options are there.
Tony: Good, well thanks for letting us come out here mate.
Paul: Yeah, thanks Tony.
Tony: Thank you mate.