Cotton Australia CEO Adam Kay recently attended the three-day Northern Australia Food Futures Conference in the Northern Territory, which included a crucial emphasis on cotton as well as numerous major announcements targeted at boosting agriculture to a $2 billion sector by 2030. Kay spoke to 500 people on water efficiency while meeting with growers and other stakeholders, including government officials and industry executives, during the event.
According to Cotton Australia, the Northern Territory government took the opportunity to present its agribusiness strategy, which includes 100,000 hectares of broadacre agriculture, including cotton, in the NT.
In support of various targets, the Northern Territory government emphasised the need for value-chain facilities such as cotton gins, as well as forecasting changing the permitted use of existing pastoral land tenure to include cropping and horticultural activities while shortening the timeframes for obtaining land clearing and water licensing approvals.
Cotton Australia applauded the strategy and committed to collaborating closely with the government and other stakeholders to achieve adequate agricultural growth sustainably. The Environment Centre NT slammed the announcement, claiming it will ‘feed further damaging land clearance.’ The NT Department of Environment, Parks, and Water’s chief executive officer, Jo Townsend, stated at the conference that “there is no substance to any of the claims made” by the NT Environment Centre.
The event also served as a platform for the launch of the Cotton, Grains, and Cattle (CGC) Programme, which aims to maximize the productivity of cropping and beef production farming systems in Western Australia’s Kununurra (Ord) Region, the Northern Territory’s Katherine and Douglas Daly regions, and developing crop production areas in north Queensland (Gilbert River system).
The program’s goal is to assist the ongoing development of integrated CGC farming systems through research, development, and extension programmed such as agronomy and crop diversity, crop protection, and biosecurity.
