Despite a lost cotton crop and a family handover no one could plan for, Kim and Prue Byrnes are always betting on the next season.
Kim Byrnes knows exactly how many spindles are on a picker: 864, at $11 each. They're the small whirling parts that pull cotton from the plant—when one fails, the picker stops. Cotton is full of small, expensive truths that turn every decision into a punt. "We're like giant gamblers," she says. "I feel like we bet every single day."
Kim and her younger sister Prue run Wirrillah Partnership, the family's 6,000-hectare farming operation south-west of Moree in northern New South Wales, growing cotton and broadacre crops with cattle on the side. "It just kind of gets in your blood," Kim says. "I love it. I don't know what it is. It's just this pull where you're like, I need to be here."
Their father Bernie is always around somewhere, doling out advice from the driver's seat of his ute, usually covered in dogs. "He's the guru," Kim says. "We're very lucky to still have his wisdom." Bernie wouldn't have it any other way. "The girls do the majority of the work," he says. "They're very practical, they're dedicated. They just love it."
The pace at this time of year is relentless—team meetings consist of vehicles parked alongside each other, lunch snatched between phone calls. "Everything looks calm on the surface," Kim says, "but we're paddling madly underneath."
They almost didn't get this far. Before last season even ended, they'd planted early and neatly when a hailstorm came through and wiped the crop out. "All that was left was a little twig," Prue says. "It just looked like a five-year-old had stuck a few little sticks in the sandpit." Insurance wouldn't pay while there was still time to replant, so with only days left in the window, they went again. "By December, everyone else's cotton was looking beautiful," Kim says. "But ours was still tiny."
The past couple of years have asked so much of them all. They'd started the succession process when their mother Cherie became very ill, very quickly, and didn't recover. Bernie stepped back and the girls stepped up. He walks with Kim and Prue through the cotton now, heads down like theirs, checking what the pickers have left behind. "They stood by me. They're incredible," he says. "The courage and stamina they've had, what they've had to endure—it's been amazing."
The second picker has arrived and both are making their way through the field, gobbling cotton rows like hungry hermit crabs, leaving a trail of bright orange and yellow modules—hard work wrapped in plastic, or "about two or three thousand pairs of underpants," Bernie says with some satisfaction.
Picking is usually Kim's favourite time of year, but not this season. They did their last water on the first of April, through a summer with no holidays and next to no sleep. A warm autumn saved them. If it had turned cold and wet, the gamble might not have
paid off.
At the end of the row, the two pickers turn as one. "Look at them go!" Kim calls. For a second, she can't help it. "It's your baby," she says. "You have to just get it through to the end. And then you just turn around and go again."
Kit The Crew
