For more than sixty years, the Ord Valley has been trying to turn abundant water into industries that last. Cotton is the latest great hope, but making things work up here has always required more than a good crop.
Words & Photography: Jessica Howard & Landi Bradshaw
Kalyn Fletcher walks through rows of a short, squat crop that from a distance looks a bit like lavender. She bends to inspect the pale seed heads and snaps a few photos on her phone. “For the client in Italy,” she says.
It’s plantago, she explains, grown for its husk known as psyllium, used in fibre supplements the world over.
"So it helps people poo?”
"It helps people poo,” she laughs.
It’s an unusual crop, but unusual is fairly normal around here. While Kalyn’s core business is forage sorghum seed, over the years she’s grown poppies, hemp, kenaf, guar and experimental safflower varieties.
Her paddocks are threaded with irrigation channels fed by Lake Argyle, a vast reservoir capable of holding more than 20 times the volume of Sydney Harbour.
"Dad used to say: ‘You can do anything here, but you can’t do everything,’” Kalyn tells me in a sorghum crop that swallows us.
And that’s farming in the Ord: almost anything will grow. Whether it’s worth
growing is a question that’s dogged the valley for decades. No crop has tested it longer, or more often, than cotton.
In the 1960s, the Ord was promoted to farmers as a kind of agricultural utopia: hot, sunny, sparsely settled and crossed by a river carrying an enormous volume of water. On paper, it was hard to see what could go wrong.
So much did. Over the years, the valley cycled through one industry after another. Cotton was among the first, then rice. Sugarcane seemed promising and grew well. A mill was built in the '90s, but then the industry collapsed.
The old mill is now home to Kimberley Agricultural Investment (KAI), the valley’s biggest farming operation—the future of the Ord housed in the ghost of its past. KAI's chief executive Jim Engelke was an agronomist during the cane years and remembers clearly what went wrong.
"It was a scale issue,” he says, careful to distinguish between a crop that fails and an industry that does. Then, there's distance. Kununurra is more than 800 kilometres by road from Darwin and 3,000 kilometres from Perth.
“We do farming after we’ve solved the logistics problem,” Jim says.
On the edge of Kununurra, a new $60 million cotton gin is waiting for its second season. Until last year none of this happened in Kununurra.
Modules had to travel 3500 kilometres across the country to Dalby in Queensland to be ginned, with growers using available backloads.
"We weren’t making any money doing that,” says Jim. “We were proving the system. The only way we’d expand was to build a gin.”
The answer was the Kimberley Cotton Company, a grower-backed venture that Jim chairs. The gin processed 81,000 bales in its first year, close to capacity.
Cottonseed is the major by-product of the gin, which produced around 23,000 tonnes of it last season. Rusty Cooke saw this as a threat and an opportunity.
For a couple of years, he experimented with ways to compress the loose seed into something that could be stored and freighted. He tried round balers, square balers, a cardboard baler and even a wool press. Nothing worked.
"You’ve got to be brave and bold and think outside the box,” Rusty says. “You just have to solve your own problems.”
The same effect plays out beyond the gin. As cotton expands, it creates work not just on farms, but for truck drivers, mechanics, electricians and contractors around town.
By the weekend, I'm at the Kununurra campdraft watching a rider cut a beast from the mob.
Rusty Cooke is here too. Here, he’s society president, and years ago helped rescue the event when it was floundering. It’s the same instinct: if something needs doing, work out how to do it.
"For me, it’s for a love of community events,” he says. “For the love of rodeo and campdraft and pulling it all together in the community. This is home to me.”
The Ord Valley has spent more than half a century trying to build an agricultural industry that lasts. All the while, people were building something else around it.
Read more great regional stories in our paper. Issue 01 available now in RB Sellars stores and with every purchase online.
The Burton
Look Westward
Amid ambition and setbacks, is cotton reshaping the future of Western Australia’s Ord Valley?
From Steel
Horses, family and a life on the land inspire a rural sculptor turning discarded steel into art.
A Cut Above
Meet the mates who bonded over meat, and saved their local butcher shop.
Of Salt And Sky
Rare floods transform Lake Eyre into an inland sea, revealing the beauty of Australia’s interior.
Bleeding Blue
A county rugby club fights for a home premiership with a town behind it.
All Hands On Deck
Long days, breakdowns and big machinery as as harvest gets underway in Central Queensland.
The Long Thread
After 200 years of wool growing, Victoria’s Mount Hesse Station is adapting for a changing future.
Whatever It Takes
Life on a vast Northern Territory cattle station where no challenge is ever small.
Look Westward
Amid ambition and setbacks, is cotton reshaping the future of Western Australia’s Ord Valley?
A Cut Above
Meet the mates who bonded over meat, and saved their local butcher shop.
Bleeding Blue
A county rugby club fights for a home premiership with a town behind it.
The Long Thread
After 200 years of wool growing, Victoria’s Mount Hesse Station is adapting for a changing future.
From Steel
Horses, family and a life on the land inspire a rural sculptor turning discarded steel into art.
Of Salt And Sky
Rare floods transform Lake Eyre into an inland sea, revealing the beauty of Australia’s interior.
All Hands On Deck
Long days, breakdowns and big machinery as as harvest gets underway in Central Queensland.
Whatever It Takes
Life on a vast Northern Territory cattle station where no challenge is ever small.
