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BUCKETS OF ENERGY: TALKING COTTON WITH GLENN ROGAN
Dan:
Hey Glenn, how's it going? How are things on the farm?
Glenn:
Yeah, good, good, Dan. It's a little busy, well, it's always busy... but we're towards the end of the growing season, and we planted our crop a little bit late, so we're at peak irrigation at the moment. There's a shortage of labour, and we're a little overworked and understaffed, and it's probably going to be like that for a while. We'd like a bit of staff rotation, but when we advertised for more staff, we really struggled to find anyone. All the farmers around here are finding the same thing. It seems like we're an employer of last resort now!
"It seems like we're an employer of last resort now!"
Glenn:
We do have a few travelling staff coming back and requesting work, but the issue we have with that is that you need some experienced staff on hand to be able to manage the backpacker staff or the travelling staff. We've employed probably 30 backpackers in the last 10 years. With the exception of probably two, they've all said the best part of their Australian backpacking experience was working on the farm.
Dan:
Do they need any farming experience?
Glenn:
No, no, they can do it without any experience at all. We do have a preference to employ people that have done trades. So, plumbers, electricians, not that they are allowed to practise in Australia, but at least you've got someone that's a bit handy. But we've also employed people that had absolutely no trades or farm experience at all. They're typically all under 25 and don't have a lot of experience.
Dan:
And what type of things will they be doing?
Glenn:
Well, a couple of people come to mind. So, a girl that stayed with us had said that she would be useless on the farm, but she'd done a lot of graphics. So, she did some graphics for us, and we taught her how to do some cotton picking. She stayed for three or four months in the end and set us up with our very first website. And her boyfriend was a snowboard instructor. Well, there's no snow out where we are; it's 45 degrees, but he was very good with kids, and he taught our kids how to ride a skateboard. So it's an exchange of ideas, an exchange of skills. That's what we like. So, when they come, if their passion is photography, well, great, we're going to take a lot of photographs around the farm, and we'll use their photographs on our website.
Ha, thinking about it, we've actually never had anyone that's had any farming experience, but we'll teach them to drive tractors and operate machinery.
Dan:
How long have you had the farm?
Glenn:
We came here in 1973. My mum and dad established the irrigation farm from scratch. There was a government scheme where they wanted primary production out of the Western areas to utilise the water and the land. Mum and Dad have retired off the farm now. Dad's 87, Mum's 82. But Dad comes out probably every second day. He's retired into town, 25 km away, but you can't keep him away!
Dan:
Haha, I bet.
IT'S MY RESPONSIBILITY
Dan:
Glenn, where does your water come from?
Glenn:
So it comes from a river. If we get a lot of rain and the river goes into flood, we harvest some of that water and put it on the farm. In Australia, irrigation water is allocated - you don't just take what you want. If you combine all St George irrigators into one group, we might harvest 5% of the water going through - the rest goes into the oceans three and a half thousand kilometres away.
Glenn:
Out here at St George, water is our most limiting resource. If I take a litre of water out of the environment and put it on my farm, it's my responsibility as a farmer to produce the maximum amount I can get out of that plant in order to clothe or feed the world. That's how I see it.
"It's my responsibility as a farmer to produce the maximum amount I can get out of that plant in order to clothe or feed the world"
Glenn:
We're always trying things to improve our water use efficiency, and one of the latest things we've done is pretty simple. We've widened our crop width for a single plant, and it's made a significant difference. We've improved it dramatically. I can hypothesise it's to do with plants knowing where neighbours are, but we've certainly improved water and time efficiency. It's meant that I can irrigate 4 or 5 times a year, not 10, 11, or 12 times. We did it mainly so we can grow multiple crops on the same piece of land without interfering with where the previous crop was grown, to produce a much higher yield.
Dan:
And why is the yield much higher?
Glenn:
Well, there's a fair bit going on, but it's a lot to do with the utilisation of soil resources. Different crops access water and nutrients at different depths. Wheat has shallow fibrous roots, but cotton can go deep into the soil searching for water.
Microbes in the soil are a very important part of the equation. Now I don't fully understand how the microbes are doing this, but we found fascinating things when you have multiple crop species in rotation, even if not growing at the same time. We've also done some interesting things with epigenetics to get higher yields. Back in 2010, 11, 12, 13, during that period, we were doing some experiments turning plant genes on or off without changing their DNA. A lot of this stuff is utilised in the florist industry to make roses produce on Valentine's Day, or how cannabis growers manipulate plants to produce more in controlled environments using different light wavelengths. We've tried similar things with cotton, working out triggers to get the plant to produce more without using more resources.
Can I do it consistently every year? I can't, but I know we can get 30% more yield with the same water if we can figure out the right triggers.
Dan:
Are you always trying to make yields higher and higher?
Glenn:
Well, there's always a balance, and it seems that nature's way is to produce either high yield or high quality; you can't seem to be able to get both. As an example, if you have wheat that produces really high protein, I can assure you the yield won't be as high as the feed-grade wheat. What you're looking for is high protein, and you want a high-protein wheat to make, say, high-quality bread or pasta. Now we're only talking margins here, but margins are important when you're talking about, say, protein content in wheat to make the bread rise properly or the pasta to ribbon properly.
The same thing with cotton, if you want a really high-quality cotton, you will have a trade-off between the high quality and the yield. Now that doesn't mean you can't grow high-yielding, but you can always grow a higher yield on the lower-quality crop than you can on the higher quality. That's the essence of the way that it works, and what we've done here is produce high quality at the highest yields we can with this variety.
Growing a higher-quality fibre is one of the things that we have focused on here at the farm. A higher quality fibre that is longer, stronger, and finer, so that you can make a garment that will last for 10 years plus.
"A higher quality fibre that is longer, stronger, and finer, so that you can make a garment that will last for 10 years plus"
Glenn:
If we grow higher quality cotton and everyone manufactures their shirts out of high quality cotton and their jeans out of really high-quality cotton, and their underwear out of high quality, if they use that and they wear it for as long as possible, that'll do a lot for the environment.
I've always been of the position that the best environmental outcome that you can achieve is by buying one piece of clothing that's a high-quality piece of clothing and wear it till it wears out. Then repair it and then hand it down. Now, is that going to do more for the environment than saying you can only grow organic cotton? I believe so, because I think it's consumption that's the biggest problem. But that's got to be a decision by every individual. When they say individuals can't do anything about the environment, absolutely, they can.
"I think it's consumption that's the biggest problem"
Dan:
Do you feel like farmers get blamed for a lot of the environmental stuff? And feel pressure to come up with solutions?
Glenn:
Ha, it stabs me in the heart! Yeah, that's true, and that's the way that we feel it. You can get yourself really down on that side of things. But the answer to that is don't watch the news as often and don't look at the media as much.
THAT'S BULLSHIT
Dan:
Yeah, that sounds frustrating. On a practical note — how do you keep track of water use, yields, and everything else?
Glenn:
So I've got an older daughter, Rebecca, and she worked in the business for 12 years, and her sole job was to collect and analyse all the data of the farm. All the wages would be put in and every job that they were doing would be analysed against the cotton production, and exactly how much chemical was put on each field, whether it was an insecticide or a herbicide, how much water was put on each field, how much rainfall fell on each field, how much water we assigned to cotton and how much water we assigned to the cotton seed, because we sell cotton and cottonseed.
Glenn:
We've kept a lot of the data over the years, which I didn't analyse myself, now that's not my job, my job is growing the cotton, so I would ask Rebecca, how much chemical can be used per kilogram of cotton this year? Or how many litres of water did we use per kilogram of cotton? And she would tell me what it is. That was a $70,000, $80,000 a year role working part-time. We're a family farming operation. At the moment, we've got two employees. Being able to analyse all the data isn't normal for a family farm.
Now that's all good information for me, and brands also wanted it, but they weren't prepared to pay for it. I just want to bring up the concept of the separation of commodities here. I think it's important to share so that people genuinely start to understand the value of these different things. One of the problems we're faced with as farmers is that brands say we've got to provide more and more data about what we're doing on the farm — that it's just part of the cost of doing business, and otherwise they'll buy someone else's cotton. And I'm saying no, that's bullshit, and I've taken the approach, then don't buy my cotton. The farmer's intellectual property right is the data that he holds on how he farms, and that should be separately paid for.
"The farmer's intellectual property right is the data that he holds on how he farms, and that should be separately paid for"
Glenn:
If someone's got a reporting requirement on, say, slave labour, and they've just got a box they've got to tick, but it requires me to present to them all of my wages information to prove that I'm not using slave labour on my farm. Well, if you want that information, pay for it. If they want me to prove what my carbon footprint is, I can do it, but they don't get it for free. I don't like other farmers getting ripped off and getting pushed in the chest about how we have to keep providing more and more data for someone else to profit on. Big brands profiteering on all this stuff about carbon, they're making the farmer produce all the data about this carbon, water use and all at the farmer's own cost. They're trying to get it all for free for their benefit, and I think that is wrong.
So, unfortunately, 12 months ago, because this didn't really get the legs and energy that we wanted it to, Rebecca's now moved on and owns her own consultancy business that is funded by the government and research organisations to do that analysis for them. I can't provide you with the information for this year's cotton because I can't analyse it to that level anymore. I'm keeping the records because I know how much water or how many sprays I put on, but the analysis was a lot more than just keeping records. You have to keep the records, analyse them and then correlate them to the kilograms of cotton you grew and on which paddocks. I've got a very deep understanding of how it works because we did a lot of that analysis ourselves, but in 10 years' time, I won't know, and I won't be able to give you the answers.
Dan:
Will that affect your farming?
Glenn:
There won't be any negative effects in my farming production system in the short term, but in the longer term, there will be. Now, some of the technologies and chemicals have certainly made things easier for us, but I wonder if they've also brought with them a bit of laziness and over-reliance.
"I wonder if (the technologies and chemicals) have also brought with them a bit of laziness and over-reliance"
Glenn:
There's always things that come up that need other solutions, and it could well be a traditional method that's better. There are no two years that are the same when we grow our cotton, and each season brings different challenges. So you really need a deep understanding of the nuances of farming and your farm's environment. You need to be able to respond intuitively to whatever comes up — and we get absolutely no subsidies whatsoever, so it's up to us to survive or fall on our own ability. And that pushes us to be innovative. Whenever it's hard, you become more inventive; you have to figure out a way for things to work with the tools you have.
SWIM OR DROWN
Dan:
Is Bollgard, the GM cotton, one of those tools?
Glenn:
Yeah, now there's a few things I want to bring in here. Firstly, what are we trying to do with cotton to be able to produce this fibre and reduce its environmental impact? One of the things we know we've got to do is reduce the chemical that we use on the crop. So what's our biggest obstacle to being able to produce a high-yielding crop and a high-quality crop? Well, here it's the little Heliothis caterpillars because their favourite thing to eat is the cotton boll.
Glenn:
So to stop that happening, we could either go back to the 1970s, when they started developing chemicals to kill the little insects. Or you can adopt this newer way of doing it, which is to trick the plant into producing a protein that naturally kills that insect. I believe that's one way of dealing with the idea of using a lot less chemical than there used to be to control the insects. Now, the last time we grew conventional cotton - not genetically modified with built-in pest resistance - I sprayed it 18 times to control the insects.
Dan:
When was that?
Glenn:
That was in 2005, and that was the last time we grew conventional cotton as a commercial crop. 18 times, that's a lot of chemicals we're using to spray, and I went, well, I'm getting rid of these chemicals. Now I'm having to pay a lot of money for the built-in pest control technology, but at least I'm getting rid of those chemicals.
"Now I'm having to pay a lot of money for the built-in pest control technology, but at least I'm getting rid of those chemicals"
Glenn:
One problem is, can these little insects develop a resistance to the protein? Well, they can, we know they can, but it's not a dominant mechanism of resistance. It's recessive, so you have to have two resistant insects mate together to produce resistant babies. The critical thing is making sure that it never happens, because if they eat your crop, you spend a lot of money.
So, what they decided to do in Australia is come up with a stewardship program. Number one, you had to have two GM proteins in the plant that will kill the targeted caterpillar, so if it develops a resistance to one, then it would be killed by the other. Also, you have to commit to having an agronomist check your crop, and if you ever see an outbreak for whatever reason, you have to collect the little caterpillars and send them away for analysis, and you must spray that crop with a chemical that will kill it.
Glenn:
The other one that we do is plant a refuge crop - typically pigeon pea, which is a legume crop. The two crops that caterpillars like most of all are cotton and pigeon pea. So thousands and thousands of caterpillars breed up on the pigeon pea that have not touched cotton and the Bt toxin, so they're all non-resistant. They fly around, and say there's one resistant moth that comes out of the cotton crop - we never want him to meet another resistant moth. We want him to mate with all these non-resistant ones from the refuge crop instead. That breaks the resistance cycle. All these stewardship programs are about resistance management.
Then they brought in a third genetic transaction in the cotton plant. So you've now got three markers, three proteins now being produced in the cotton plant to try and be absolutely certain that there's no caterpillars going to survive in the cotton plant within Australia. So it's all about reducing the amount of chemicals that we're using. However, one of my concerns, and it's a very genuine concern, is what is happening to other little organisms because of the protein that's being produced by the plant. Well, we know it's not killing sucking insects, we know it's not killing little wasps, we know it's not killing a lot of the little good guys - it's not killing thrips, it's not killing aphids, it's not killing all these other things.
"One of my concerns, and it's a very genuine concern, is what is happening to other little organisms"
Glenn:
It does seem to have an effect on another species of caterpillar, but there doesn't seem to be any other insects that it affects. But what is it doing to the microorganisms underground? The roots of the cotton plant are producing all these exoskeletons underground. So I'm concerned about what it's doing to the worms underground. Do they all die because of these proteins now in the ground?
So a few years ago, I got concerned by this, so we got a significantly expensive analysis done on all our fields of what all our microorganisms were, including hyphae and all the fungi in the soil. And we found that we have really, really healthy levels of all the microorganisms that they could test for.
Dan:
And this is an independent company, not connected to Monsanto and now Bayer, who makes the seeds?
Glenn:
No, no, a company called Metagen in Australia does that test, and they're a separate organisation. The tests don't deal with my concerns comprehensively, but they're pretty good. So, what is it doing to the worm populations in our soil? Well, typically there's not a lot of worm populations in our soil, but there are little micro worms, and we have found worms in our soil, not at the populations I'd like, because I'd like more of them. But I also want to say it's unusual to find them in my natural paddocks as well. It's hard to find worms because we don't have a very moist soil climate here. The eggs survive in a dry climate, but the little earthworms themselves would only survive in wet conditions.
So does the protein affect the soil? Well, some of this stuff we don't know, but I think it's going to be having an effect, whether it's a measurable effect or not. Some of these things are only small increments. Some of the reason we try to rest our soil is so that it's not continuously a monoculture of just cotton on cotton on cotton. Typically, if you grow a monoculture of any crop, you'll reduce your diversity of microorganisms in the soil. You'll have much healthier microorganisms if you have multi-species in your ground, including worms.
"You'll have much healthier microorganisms if you have multi-species in your ground, including worms"
Dan:
Do your soil tests also check for carbon levels?
Glenn:
Well, yes, but almost no matter what we do we haven't been able to make our soil carbon levels increase. Well, that's not entirely true because some years it increases, and I'll give you an example. If the weather conditions are right, we pick our crop and reincorporate the rest of the crop back into the soil and rotary hoe it in, and then the next year we grow some mung beans and we rotary hoe that back into the ground, then I almost guarantee that our soil carbon levels will be higher because you've had two good crops in a row. But then a situation will happen where you haven't got water to grow a crop in that field, so you'll leave it without a crop in it, and then the next year it'll have lower carbon again.
Glenn:
Ideally, we'd get our carbon levels higher and higher because that means we've got plenty of food there for the microorganisms, but it also means that we've got a better and higher water-holding capacity in our soil. So how are we going to achieve higher carbon levels in our soil? Well, I haven't been able to nail it yet.
"So, how are we going to achieve higher carbon levels in our soil? Well, I haven't been able to nail it yet"
Dan:
With Bollgard. One of the rules of using it is that you're not allowed to reuse seeds, right?
Glenn:
Yeah, that's right. So there's a reason they don't want you to reuse that plant. If you only pay for the technology for one year, and you get your technology for two years, you've got free technology. People here used to return cotton, so they'd grow a crop one year, they'd return it, and it would regrow the next year, and you can actually get a bit of a yield. Say you've got 15 bales in the first year, you might get 7 or 8 in the second year. Well, people used to do that, but it was without Bollgard genes in it. With the Bollgard genes, it's illegal; they'll take you to court.
One of the problems is that we signed a technology user agreement for Bollgard cotton, because, as I mentioned earlier, the biggest pest here for our cotton is the Heliothis caterpillar, and I don't like spraying insecticides around, so it had to be Bollgard cotton. But the technology user agreement means I can't grow a crop from one year and use the same seeds or plant them again the next.
Dan:
And how about experimentation? Do the user agreements also limit that?
Glenn:
So, well, it does, the answer to that is that it definitely does. It limits your investigation of what other possibilities are out there. I had to apply for a permit to do my trials, and I could only get a permit for two hectares, which is only a little trial plot here.
Dan:
Is there anything restricting you from experimenting on your farm with cotton varieties that don't have user agreements?
Glenn:
No, there's nothing restricting me from that. I can have a paddock of conventional cotton, which has no chemistry, no genetic modification. There's nothing stopping me from doing that at all.
So altruistically, I say we shouldn't be using it, but if you want to be a farmer and you want to survive, you have to have mechanisms that you can rely upon and survive until the next year or the next 10 years. And to be perfectly honest, if the world doesn't want to go hungry and have mass starvation across the world from this point on, you have to come up with some clever ways of doing this stuff. Now that might sound a little bit alarmist. I'm not trying to be an alarmist. I'm trying to be a realist.
If you're backed into a corner where you have to find a way to swim or drown, you will try to find a way to swim, and that use of GM provides us with a secure way of doing two things: dealing with pests and using less chemicals.
"If you're backed into a corner where you have to find a way to swim or drown, you will try to find a way to swim"
Glenn:
So has the introduction of GM limited the potential to find other mechanisms to deal with those? Absolutely, it has. But we've just got to figure out our best way through it, and that's one of the mechanisms I can use to find the best way through that's going to have the least negative effect that I can find. GM has given me the ability to focus on these other things that are also really important.
THERE'S ALWAYS A BALANCE
Glenn:
I think people have different buckets of energy. A bucket of physical energy, conceptual energy, imaginative or scientific. People have different-sized buckets. Now, with say my bucket of intellectual energy, if the only thing I can deal with is how to control my insects, well, that's used up a lot of my bucket. I'm running out of intellectual energy to put into other things.
But if the top part of the bucket is just understanding the science behind GM, well, I've then got a lot of the rest of the bucket, and I can put my intellectual energy into trying to achieve some of these other big picture items like water efficiency and producing high-quality cotton and the ability to rotate the crops and understand organisms. Different people have different capacities; maybe their physical energy bucket is much higher than mine, or maybe they have this amazingly musical bucket, whatever it is. Ha, my musical bucket is not very good.
So the capacity of my farming system to be able to utilise GM crops means that my energy can be put into solving some of my other bigger issues. As you get older, you still have that intellectual curiosity, and you've got this burning desire, but your physical capacity to be able to have the energy to sustain that all day and actually achieve a few of those outcomes becomes less. I found that, and between 40 and 50, it was this wealth of harvest for me, I had lots of intellectual energy and lots of physical energy. So, as you go on, I found that I need to reduce my workload because there's all these things I want to do, but I can't actually see them through to fruition.
I thought that the bucket's pretty much as big as you want to make it, but it's not. You've got the limitations of how much you can fit in, how much time you can spend at work, how much time you can spend with the family; all those things are limited, and you can't do everything at the same time.
Dan:
So it's all about making calculated compromises to keep the whole system moving?
Glenn:
Yeah exactly. There's always this balance going on as to what your priorities are and what you can do. What we're trying to achieve with our production system is a balance which gives us high quality, high yields, financial stability, and a healthy environment. Whether that's growing cotton or whether it's growing mung beans or sunflowers, that's the way that our mindset is.
First of all you must be financially sustainable, otherwise you've got very little chance of achieving any other sustainability. So financially sustainable, environmentally sustainable, are really important because this is where we live and work. Most people have a different approach as to how they're going to achieve that, and it's a very, very difficult balance, often under really trying conditions.
"First of all you must be financially sustainable, otherwise you've got very little chance of achieving any other sustainability"
Dan:
One of those being not much labour around? Is that one of the reasons you use Roundup for your weeds? [synthetic chemical herbicide].
Glenn:
Yeah, so Roundup is all about the limited resources and labour we have. We use Roundup to limit the weeds growing within that cotton plant field that are taking resources away, water resources, and our biggest resource is water; they are also taking away sunlight and the fertiliser that we put in there.
Weeds can be controlled in other ways. You can get in there and cotton chip. The way we used to do it is you go through and chip out all the weeds by hand with a little chipper. But it's very, very labour-intensive, and we don't have the labour for that.
There's always a trade-off. So when we control the weeds in our field, we use several different techniques. So if you want to control the grass species, for example, if that's our issue, we'll use a pre-emergent herbicide that we'll put on the soil that will stop the grass species from coming up. People say well why are you doing that? And I say well, the reason I'm using that is because I don't want to use more than two Roundup sprays. I want to limit the amount of Roundup I use. So if I continually swamp my field and my soil with Roundup, I'm having an influence on some of my little microorganisms within the soil. I know that. Can I completely eliminate spraying Roundup in my cotton crop? Well, yes, I can, but then I've got to use another pre-emergent weedicide that will also control some of my broadleaves [weeds with broad, flat leaves that compete with crops for nutrients]. Then I'll need to use another broadleaf pre-emergent that I put on the soil that will control some other broadleaf weeds.
So why am I using it? Well, I haven't got enough people, there's not enough staff, and the cost would be too high to use cotton chippers. So there's not enough people out here. So we try to use enough chemistry on the soil to control our weeds, but not enough that the soil can't recover from that. The soil has got a remarkable ability to recover. You want to control the weeds, but you don't want to sterilise your soil. So you use a bit of Roundup to control the weeds, and use a different chemistry of broad-leaf residual spray during the season, and I believe the soil's got the capacity to manage that. I want to limit the total number of grams of chemistry used on my paddock and on my soil because the soil's got to digest all that.
"So we try to use enough chemistry on the soil to control our weeds, but not enough that the soil can't recover from that"
Glenn:
So is Roundup a valuable tool? Roundup is an extremely valuable tool in our production system because we're able then to maximise the amount of energy and resources that goes into producing cotton. And that's what I'm about, I'm about producing cotton. Then I grow a separate crop in that same soil the year, and that will help the soil to recover again. Then I'll go back to cotton. I'm still producing a crop out of that.
Dan:
And with the rotational crop, you don't use Roundup?
Glenn:
No, no.
GOOD HEARTED FEELING
Dan:
Glenn, is there any cotton grown organically in Australia? Have you tried that direction?
Glenn:
So there were a couple of farms that were trying to go organic in Australia. They were having a red-hot crack at it. They could use some chemical applications that are organic, but not synthetic. Some of the naturally occurring chemicals can kill everything they touch, so you still have to be careful using them. But when you take the chemicals out of the environment, suddenly you've got natural predators of the pests back in there that help you, like little wasps that will eat the grubs, and you've got this thing called an assassin bug that will eat the caterpillars.
But the guys that were trying to go organic were finding it very, very difficult to come up with enough of these natural predators. The problem they had is they could not get the yields high enough to make it financially viable. They tried for a few years. I had a conversation with them, and they were guys that had a real go of it. They said they could not achieve the yields, and they kept going back to their most limiting resource, which is water. They had all this good-hearted feeling of trying to go organic here but couldn't make it work. Well, I can't afford to be that person.
Glenn:
The word organic will describe a vision in people's minds that is better for their kids or for the environment, but I'm always a little guarded from the idea that everything has to be organic because there's always a balance to the equation. One of those being if people want to go organic, then they have to pay a significant price.
"I'm always a little guarded from the idea that everything has to be organic because there's always a balance to the equation"
Glenn:
I was seriously interested in being organic, but I established that number one, wages were too high in Australia, number two, you can't get enough people to work on the farm anyway to chip the weeds out of your crop. But it's a very real possibility in other countries where farmers are working on one hectare or five acres and where they do have a significant understanding of beneficial insects and how that natural cycle can work.
When I went over and spoke a couple of times in China, they were amazed that a farmer found his way out of Australia and flew over to a different country. I found their perception of a farmer is different to here. It's typically someone that hasn't gone to school and has worked instead. But they were very, very good at growing organically and have a very good education of understanding of their soil, their plants and their seasons — all those other things that are really important as a farmer, they understand that intimately. But it's a different story when they were handed a heap of chemicals without being educated on that concept.
So is organic cotton feasible here? Well, a few people thought it was, and they couldn't do it. So what's so different about me? I don't believe I can do it either on the scale I need to. I came to the conclusion that our most limiting resource here is water, and no matter all my good intentions with those other concepts, is it sustainable in our environment, and is it responsible in my environment? And I came to the conclusion that it wasn't, and I couldn't achieve it.
"Our most limiting resource here is water"
Dan:
And why would growing organically use more water?
Glenn:
Because you can't yield as high. If someone can grow 15 bales a hectare, achieving 2 bales per megalitre, growing organic cotton here, then I'm in there like a flash. I'll do it tomorrow. But typically, the yield on an organic crop would be remarkable if they could achieve more than about five bales per hectare. You would be using about the same amount of water that I'm using in Australia to grow 15 bales a hectare.
THE GOLDEN EGG
Glenn:
Now we've talked about some of the holistic and altruistic things that we try to do here on the farm. A lot of it's seat-of-the-pants stuff, it's not written down, it's a knowledge you have from doing it for a long time. Now the other thing I want to touch on is the cotton's story — and the concept of the story as a commodity.
About 12 years ago, we could see that there was a move towards people wanting to know where their food and fibre came from. So, we started making our move into ingredient marketing and being a supplier of high-quality cotton that also provides a story that manufacturers and brand owners can use. It's all about the storytelling and the promotion of the brand, and we believe the best way to link into that is to set our target at producing the highest-quality cotton in Australia and share that story.
So, Australia produces in the top 5% of the world's cotton quality, and we wanted to be on top of that and set ourselves up so that no matter what, up and down prices happened in the world, our price would be reasonably stable so people always want and can have the best quality. Well, it hasn't quite worked the way we thought it would work, and I'll give you an example.
Glenn:
We had a merchant who was buying our cotton for about 10% higher than they were paying for everyone else's cotton. Even though I believe it was worth more than that. I asked what they were doing with the cotton? They said, we're using your cotton as a golden egg to get the deals for the rest of our cotton. So they would buy it off me at 10% more, and they would supply it to a spinning mill as an incentive or as a teaser to get them to buy another 50,000 bales.
"We're using your cotton as a golden egg to get the deals for the rest of our cotton"
Dan:
50,000 bales from a different cotton variety from a different grower?
Glenn:
Yeah, exactly, so they would sell them 1,000 bales from me and then another 50,000 bales from somewhere else. They weren't getting any higher price for our cotton. They said, it's not worth any more to us in value, but it's worth a lot to us in our branding as cotton merchants. And they wouldn't put us in touch with the spinning mill because they wanted to keep the spinning mill well away from the cotton grower.
So I found that really discouraging because that was devaluing my cotton as the spinning mill was getting my cotton for the same price as the rest of the cotton that wasn't as high quality. Mine was just the teaser. We were met with a fair bit of that, so we believed we had to get to probably 50,000 bales of cotton to have a currency of volume to be able to get a manufacturer to really want our cotton. Then they could buy a larger line of cotton that was the same quality.
Now, the most cotton that we've ever grown in one year is 8,000 bales. Our normal year would be 5,000 bales, so we couldn't do it ourselves, and that was part of the reason we set up Australian Super Cotton as a brand. I had this vision that we would have five or six or seven growers that would all produce a long staple cotton that would get us to our 50,000 volume, which would have currency. Well, we never achieved that, and the way it all played out is that people knew that we were only getting 10% more than everybody else, and they said, well, we're not doing it for that. And that's because you really need to get 30% more than everybody else is getting to make up for the lower yield. But it put us into this conceptual idea of what are we actually selling, and we're actually selling different things. We're selling a commodity cotton, which is the intrinsic value of the product, and then as a separate commodity, we should be charging a price for the story.
"...we should be charging a price for the story."
Glenn:
So, when is the story worth something to the brand owner? Well, there is a risk involved because they only make money if that story sells a product for them. With brand owners before, it's always been about, well, we'll pay you a little bit more for the cotton, and then we'll get your story as part of the price. But the price that the brand owner was paying for the cloth was significantly higher than the price that I was getting for my cotton, and it wasn't proportional. So, how is that working?
Well, number one, you've got wastage. And the problem I was seeing was the spinning mill, or the brand owner, manufacturer, or the processing of all the cotton — they're all carrying the higher price for all their wastage, and the price seems to escalate and grow like a snowball as you go along. So I was trying to get a price in there to pay for my story, but I was looking at this and thinking, well, how can I ever get any more money when the pricing snowballs like that?
Well, we came up with this concept of having the sale of the commodity of the story, only getting paid to me when there's a sale. So if you're selling a t-shirt and the person looks at the swing tag, and they go, "That cotton comes from Australia, Western Queensland, and it's really high quality, and there's the family who grew it, I know where it comes from, and that's the t-shirt I want." Well, that's when the brand owner gets paid for the story. So that's when it's of value to the brand owner.
Then we went, well, how much is that worth? Let's say I got a dollar for the story for every t-shirt that's sold, then I've doubled my farm's income. I'm not saying that we have to go down that line, but I like talking about that royalties-like concept because it doesn't snowball all the costs. You're only paying for the original commodity of cotton. And if you're buying high-quality cotton, you pay a little bit more for it. You might pay 20% more or 30% more, but that's based on the quality, and then you pay for the story on top of that. There's no system in place at the moment, but I do like talking about it because it opens people up to the idea of the story as a commodity.
Dan:
And how did English Fine Cottons come into things?
Glenn:
Yeah, so Meriel [Full Circle Fibres] put us in contact with English Fine Cottons, and they said they were only interested in doing single-sourced cotton, and we went 'hallelujah, that's what we need'. We need someone who really appreciates that, already has brands that were interested in the story of where this cotton came from, and that's able to put the grower in touch with the brand owner, so then you can have a conversation with your customers.
"They said they were only interested in doing single-sourced cotton, and we went hallelujah!"
Glenn:
Now there's a lot of value in single-sourced cotton. When spinning mills blend high-quality cottons with lesser cottons from all over the place, all different lengths, thicknesses, and that yarn won't last as long as single-sourced yarn, even if the specification looks the same on paper. That's some of the quality you're gaining from English Fine Cottons because they understand that.
Dan:
By single-sourced, are you talking about one farm?
Glenn:
Ok, with single-sourced, it doesn't have to be just me. They could use seven different growers' cotton from around our region — similar growing conditions, similar fibre characteristics — and I believe that's still a single-sourced yarn. There is a risk in hitching your wagon to just one grower. Now I do grow a longer staple cotton than everyone else in our area and Australia. It's finer and stronger and longer, so that gives us the edge. But the reason I'm mentioning this is that if you hitch your wagon to only me and I stop growing the cotton, you don't want to be dropped off.
As well, what if something goes wrong with my story? What if someone writes a really bad review about what I'm doing? Now, I'm able to answer all the questions; there's no problem, I've got nothing to hide, but you've got to be conscious of that backlash because it's a risk in today's environment.
Dan:
So, how can a brand, or manufacturer, or someone buying an item, actually prove the cotton is yours?
Glenn:
Yeah, so how can you prove that the cotton is from my farm? Because that trust is really important. It can't be just, 'trust me, I'm an honest farmer, that's where it came from.'
"It can't be just, 'trust me, I'm an honest farmer, that's where it came from'"
Glenn:
Say the bales are getting transported, they will go into a warehouse to get put onto a ship, and people could just swap the barcodes from my bale and put it into another bale. That happens. So how do you deal with that? It's a big challenge. We have been through multiple avenues of third-party verification, but traceability systems are complicated and expensive, and I can't do it unless it becomes an intrinsic part of the sale of my cotton. We have got cotton here from multiple years, so it would work, but we've never been able to do it because it's a very high cost for us.
Dan:
It feels like there's a lot of demand for transparency around, but it's clearly much easier said than done.
Glenn:
Yeah, absolutely! It's very complicated.
LOOKING FORWARD
Dan:
How big is your farm, Glenn?
Glenn:
Well, it's reducing at the moment. So it was 3,785 hectares, and we just sold about 300 hectares, and we're currently in the process of looking at selling some more land and some more water. For a few reasons, but one of those reasons is that I want to do some other things I haven't had time for as well. I have some other plans about what I want to do around the world. I also want to bring it back to the core original family farm, and I can do a lot more of my experimentation stuff that I want to do. Because I'm not then focused on trying to achieve all the high-production stuff that I've been doing.
Dan:
Is that selling water that's allocated for that plot of land?
Glenn:
Yeah, so I'll sell some entitlement to a water allocation with that land. Some of that reason is because I know now that I can produce more with every litre of water than I could 10 years ago. Absolutely without a doubt. So there's a potential there. Either I keep growing my production system, because I've got more water, I can produce more. Or at 58, I can bring my production system back so I can focus on those things that I find really fascinating and utilise my energy at a very focused level to try and deliver more changes in agriculture.
"I know now that I can produce more with every litre of water than I could 10 years ago"
Glenn:
Bringing it back to the original family farm, would still be about 1,500 acres or, what's that, 800 hectares. It's still a big family farm, but then I can put more of my energy into solving a few of the things I've got in the back of my mind that I haven't talked about because they're just concepts at the moment.
Dan:
I'm sure you've got quite a few ready to go!
Glenn:
Ha, yeah, and I want to do more proof of concepts. Because there's things that I've observed that I find fascinating. Why has that happened? Can I replicate it and find out what happens if you try to do it? If I sell some more land, then I'll be in a position where I can do these things without it potentially bringing me undone financially. So I'm looking forward to this next period.
Dan:
More freedom for all that sounds exciting!
THEY'RE MY FRIENDS
Dan:
One last thing. What's the situation with snakes on the farm? I know they're important, but I didn't love what came up from a quick 'Snakes in St George' search.
Glenn:
Ha, I find this quite fascinating. A lot of people that come to the farm, I'll drive around with them, and I'll see two or three snake tracks on the drive around the farm. I'll mention to someone, oh, you would have seen that snake track back down the road, and they'll say snake track? Well, I know that snake's about four feet long, and he's gone that way, and that was probably about two hours ago, you can tell by the track. They're amazingly good at not being seen. You've got to be pretty switched on to see their snake tracks, even though I find it pretty easy to see.
"Well, I know that snake's about four feet long, and he's gone that way"
Glenn:
Are there many snakes? I've probably seen 10 snakes this year on the farm. I've probably seen 30 or 40 snake tracks. If I've seen 10 snakes, there's probably 100 on the farm at any one time. Have I ever been bitten by a snake? No. Do I ever walk from the house to the shed without a torch? No. No, I don't. Because they're around. But you don't see them very often because they're terrified of me.
Dan:
Dare I ask about spiders?
Glenn:
Ha, we had an English fella and his girlfriend here, we gave them a house to live in, it's not the Ritz, but it's got a bed. On the first night, they saw a huntsman in the house, and for the next week, they slept in their car.
Dan:
That would be me!
Glenn:
So when you walk through my cotton fields, there's spiders everywhere. And when we have visitors, they go why don't you kill the spiders, there's spiders everywhere. I went, 'they're my friends'. You can't kill the spiders, they're doing a job, you know. They do an amazing job, and in the field, you see all their little spider webs glistening in the field; they're amazingly great for pests. So spiders and snakes are good; they do a great job, they can stay, but I don't like mice, I don't like foxes, I don't like rabbits, and I don't like cats.
Glenn:
So that's 101 cotton farming in St. George.
Dan:
Brilliant, thanks very much, Glenn.
***
Glenn and I are trying his 'story as commodity' idea. A percentage of the sale price of each Discovery t-shirt sold goes back to Rogan Pastoral Co.