GOOD supply of water and the advent of Roundup Ready Flex have convinced Phillip and Narelle Wilkie to grow cotton for the first time in more than a decade.
The couple who farm about 1300 hectares of dryland country and 100ha of irrigation, on a number of properties at Dakenba, near Biloela had not grown cotton since 2000, before Bollgard II technology was introduced.
"In 2000 we sprayed 18 times. I'd had a gutful; I said I'd never grow cotton again," Mr Wilkie said.
"That's all we did we were just spraying every week.
"As soon as you planted it, you were spraying. If you weren't cultivating for weeds, you were spraying for sucking insects or heliothis.
"It was a nightmare."
The Wilkies have about 100ha of irrigation on their home block, Emohrou, which they have planted entirely to Sicot 74 BRF cotton.
They normally flood-harvest overland flows to fill their two dams, which hold about 700 megalitres, but this year due to the fact Callide Dam is releasing, they have been able to pull water from their allocation out of the Callide Creek.
The Wilkies bought Emohrou in 1981, a year before they married, and while they experienced some tough times early on, they have been able to gradually purchase a number of nearby properties since then Black Diamond, Zangari, Summers, and most recently, Milora.
When they purchased the 424ha Milora on Kroombit Creek a year ago, it was run entirely as a cattle-grazing property.
Despite it being flooded last December, they have worked around the clock to clear the property back to farmland, and last week planted the first crop on the farm 360ha of Buster sorghum.
They have farmed controlled traffic and zero till since 1989.
They also share-farm an additional 370ha on the Goos family's property, Valentine Plains, which they will plant to Satan II and Crystal mung beans this summer.
They recently harvested about 970ha of Kennedy wheat and 64ha of Kyabra and Moti chickpea.
Mr Wilkie said the irrigated cotton was planted at a rate of 14kg/ha into fallow from last summer, when they planted a sorghum crop. The cotton has had about 136mm of in-crop rain and has been watered three times.
"If we didn't have the water, we still probably would have gone with cotton, but we would have planted it in a skip-row configuration," Mr Wilkie said.
"Because we had the water, we decided to plant it solid. Cotton is the most cost-effective usage of water if the price is right."
Mr Wilkie said he was "tickled pink" with how the cotton was looking, especially considering he couldn't see the rows for weeds when it first came out of the ground.
"The cotton came up and the weeds all came up with it, like hairs on a cat's back," he said.
"We couldn't really see the rows the weeds were that bad. We hit it with Roundup Flex at 1.5kg/ha and it just wiped out everything bar the cotton.
"The cotton has only had two herbicide sprays of Roundup Flex ... we have done no insecticide sprays. It just makes cotton that much more attractive."
The Wilkies' two sons, Stuart, 23, and Raymond, 26, are working in the family business, and Mrs Wilkie said their involvement was a large part of the decision to purchase Milora.
Mrs Wilkie said in the early-to-mid 1980s the interest rates on one of their loans hit 22.5 percent, which made it a struggle to survive.
"Interest rates escalated so much that the set payments we were making weren't even meeting our interest repayments," she said.
Thankfully, they had another source of income an off-farm contracting business Mr Wilkie started when he was 19, in 1977.
"There were a lot of farmers in the region who were just beside themselves they didn't know whether they were going to get through," he said.
"The years were dry as well, so you were copping it both ways you had the high interest and the dry seasons.
"We were only young but we could still see there was a future in farming and we rode it out."
The Wilkies continue to run the off-farm contracting business, and operate as Wilco Farming and Contracting.
Share-farming has been the key to the Wilkies' success. They share-farmed Black Diamond for four years before purchasing it in 1994, and share- farmed the 290ha Zangari for 18 years before buying it in 2004. They also leased the 100ha Summers for 15 years before purchasing it in 2006.
Their daughter Kimberley, 20, also owns and runs a coffee shop in Biloela Caf Aroma Kariboe.
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