Lachlan's banana crop is 10 times more profitable than cotton, but without workers he had no choice but to trade

Acres of tall leafy trees on Western Australia's largest banana plantation have been replaced by bright fields of cotton, with a critical shortage of staff making fiber more economically viable than cotton. fruit.

Key Points: Growers running WA's largest banana farm are replacing more than half of their plantation with cotton due to a labor shortage Northern mango growers of Australia turn to new forecasting technology to improve workforce management seasonal workers

For the first time in 27 years of farming, the Dobson family picked a crop of cotton, after having destroyed more than a third of its banana plantation in the Ord Valley last year.

< p class="_1HzXw">With the 40 employees usually needed to pick the bananas on the plantation 120 hectares falling to just five t workers last season, Lachlan Dobson said the family had no choice but to reduce the size of their banana crop.

That meant clearing 50 hectares of trees and look for a cost-effective replacement.

"If we had left that, it would have introduced some sort of fairly significant biosecurity issues for the remaining planting, so it needed to be removed," a- he said.

"We sat down and did kind of an analysis to try to figure out which low-labor crop we could grow which. would give us the best yields and cotton won it quite comfortably.

"The yields we'd get from bananas are more than 10 times better than what we'd get for cotton, but without work we could not progress with bananas."

The transitio n was difficult, with land clearing, new irrigation infrastructure and contractors needed to plant and harvest the fibrous crop.

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But Mr Dobson said the investment had paid off, with the property's labor demand now much lower.

"We can manage cotton by jumping on a motorbike and driving every morning for about 20 minutes just to make sure the irrigation system worked and everything is moving forward and that's basically all the work you do,” he said. /p>

"The benefit is going to be that we're actually going to look back on those 50 hectares we've planted."

The Dobsons are planning to clear an additional 40 hectares and expand their cotton plantations to 90 hectares next season.

In the long term, Mr. Dobson hoped that the eventual return of labor to the property would allow a rapid return to bananas.

"We have the ability to change crops quite quickly," he said. says.

"We'll just sit back and wait to see what the labor market looks like."

Let's get to technology

So While crop shifts are possible for some, mango growers in North Australia are turning to technology to help manage staffing shortfalls.