The Town and Coutnry Club, Moree was the venue for the Cotton Soils Constraints Forum on the 14th July.

A four tonne elephant would about a tenth of the downward force that a 7760 does on the soil surface!

The day kicked off with an open session on soil constraint issues as identified by the 30 growers, consultants, RDOs and researchers in the room. We then turned to the issue of compaction, how UNE is using commercial capacitance sets to try and identify it and what NCEA and CSIRO see as the science behind it. Without a doubt the impact of the 32 tonne 7760 picker was being felt (quite literally) around the room with various approaches to dealing with this machine being discussed. We then moved on to talk about the weather, research and extension priorities before finishing off with a quick discussion on the value of revamping SoilPAK, which is now almost 20 years old! A busy and enlightening day, but that in itself won’t fix our soils.

Black root rot came up in discussions. This fungus can’t be erradicated, but on its own can not kill coton.