3 minute read
New South Wales
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n By Robert Quirk,
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NSW Director and senior Vice Chair Summer 2018–19
Australia is truly the land of droughts and flooding rain. There had been metres of rain in the North of Queensland and NSW farmers were now thinking their crops would go unharvested and could make a stand over crop.
The three rivers in NSW were affected by the unseasonably dry weather, with some areas reaching critical drought conditions.
Autumn 2019
Despite struggling through the worst drought in history for the Northern Rivers of NSW, there will still the prospect of a reasonable cane harvest closer to the coast. Upstream on all rivers the rain had not fallen in the same quantities.
The harvest of soy beans started around the end of April, early May. Some crops were lost to the dry, others made a reasonable crop of beans.
Winter 2019
Drought and frost – it was a terrible winter in NSW. Rainfall was well below average for this time of the year. NSW had received some of the coldest weather for the past few years with temperatures dropping to minus 4.7°C away from the coast.
There had been frost damage across the three rivers with some growers suffering major losses.
Even though it had been dry, we started the harvest for a few days then of course rain arrived which stopped us for over a week.
October–November 2019
The harvest has had some good and bad parts and with little to no rain coming, the outlook for 2020 may not be good.
This year we had a very dry summer which included January and February, rain in March triggered good growth but then at the start of harvest much of the cane growth was less than 6 months old.
We started the harvest on low sugar. The cold nights and warm days with a lot of sun light has increased the CCS as one would expect. Research tells us that the night time temperature must drop below 18C degrees, and the larger the difference between the night and day temperatures the more perfect for the sugarcane to make sugar, of course sunlight is needed also.
Planting started in mid to later August with many growers having to water or stop planting. The watering in NSW is done with 4000 litre tanks doing three rows at a time – very time consuming but it works.
With little to no rain in the forecast, the projections for 2020 are not looking good. We have had major frosts in some areas requiring some of the year-old cane in NSW to be harvested instead of being left to go through as a two-year old crop for next year.
Always the optimist – if we get a good summer rainfall it is amazing what can happen to sugarcane. Sugarcane has been growing in NSW for well over one hundred years and I see no reason for it not to be here in another 100 years.
All NSW mills will finish around the end of November, and with even reasonable growing conditions this should go well for the 2020 crop.
I had a visit from a group of geography teachers from around the country – a bus load of around 45. They visited to see sugarcane being grown. While some were from sugarcane areas around Mackay most were from areas inland and south where sugarcane cannot grow.
They were interested in our Acid Sulfate soil remediation and the carbon work we are doing. One can gauge the interest of a group by their questions. By this measure they were very interested.
I was able to tell them that ongoing measurements show my 100 hectares farm has captured 77,000 tonnes of carbon in CO2 equivalents in the last 20 years. The carbon has been stored in the ground, using cover crops and residue retention. This group added to the 2000 or so visitors who have visited in the last 20 years. n
NSW 2018 HARVEST SUMMARY Mill area Tonnes Tonnes per Average hectare CCS
Condong 530,167 117.5 11.73 Broadwater 767,245 120.4 12.13 Harwood 705,977 137.3 12.02
NSW production: 2,003,390 tonnes
