Q&A with Matt Norie
Matt Norrie is a dryland and irrigation farmer from Narrabri. He is also a board member of Namoi Water. Matt shares a few thoughts during one of the busiest times of the year.
Matt Norrie is about halfway through harvesting 650 hectares of winter crop. He’s pretty tired but the yields are good so he’s keen to do a couple more laps of the paddock. We helped him pass the time with a quick Q&A session.
What do you grow?
Cotton, wheat, barley and cattle. We don’t muck around with chickpeas, we decided back in 2010 that we weren’t very good chickpea growers, so we stuck with cotton and wheat. You do need to have some sort of a rotation in your dryland farming system, you can’t just plant wheat on wheat, but what we’ve found is that with the advent of better cotton varieties we’ve been able to incorporate cotton into our dryland rotation. So we’re just growing cotton and wheat in rotation on both the irrigated and dryland country and it’s working really well.
How does that affect nitrogen levels?
Obviously the benefit of chickpeas is that you get free nitrogen. That works really well in a wheat and chickpea rotation but a chickpea and cotton rotation doesn’t work that well because cotton has it’s own diseases that are actually hosted by chickpeas. So if you grow cotton behind chickpeas you’re actually building the levels of these diseases in the soil. We find that with the wheat and cotton rotation, neither of them are hosts for each other as far as diseases go. To maintain nitrogen levels in the soil I have to apply fertilizer.
How does your year usually play out?
I can pretty much script my life month by month. January is irrigating cotton, in February I’m still irrigating cotton and spraying and starting to get country prepared for the upcoming winter crops. March is defoliating cotton, April is picking cotton, in May I’m finishing cotton picking and sowing winter crops, spraying and turning the cotton country around and preparing it to go back into wheat. June is sowing and then through to August I’m following a spray program and trying to sneak in a holiday somewhere. September is starting to fertilise and prepare cotton country, October is planting cotton and starting winter crop harvest, November is winter crop harvest and December is fertilizing cotton and starting to irrigate and trying to find some time off over Christmas. That is pretty much the script I follow every year.
How is the cotton looking?
Excellent. It’s all planted on full moisture and starting to come out of the ground. I’ve just got to get off the header and back on the spray rig to spray the cotton when I get a chance.
If you had a meeting with the Prime Minister this afternoon, what would you talk to him about?
It would be a conversation about the restoration of property rights. There are a whole lot of issues around native vegetation, water sharing plans and how they impact on access to irrigation rights. Just that continual creep of legislation into every day farming practices.
If you could convince the entire world of one thing what would it be?
That food doesn’t just come from the supermarket.
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