and I’ll just bet you finished that line with “pick a bale of cotton”. I’ll be disappointed if you didn’t, because I was singing it, in my head at least, all day when we took the Cotton Farm tour in Goondiwindi.

We are now on the border, literally, of Queensland and New South Wales and this is big farm country – grains such as wheat, sorghum, barley and chick peas, and cotton. This is the type of place where the toilets at the caravan park are labelled Blokes and Sheilas, or The Old Fella and The Missus. You overhear conversations in the pub about whether there were many dead kangaroos on the road into town. A major town attraction is a statue of Gunsynd, a horse that ran third in the Melbourne Cup in 1972, (to be fair it did win 29 of 52 starts). The toilets here are labeled Fillies and Colts in case you are wondering.

Goondiwindi is a lovely town with an urban population of around 5,500, bulked up by about that number again when the districts are included. You feel you wouldn’t mind paying your rates (city taxes) as the facilities are so good: lots of green spaces, parks, sports centres and playing fields. We’re told that through dry periods they keep the town watered and green, to lift the spirits of the farmers when they come from their brown, drought ridden farms. Water is a tightly held, monitored and metered resource here, as we find when we tour the cotton farm.

As we drive towards Goondiwindi the roadside looks like giant bags of cotton wool have exploded. This isn’t too far from the truth as the cotton gets blown about during harvest, which is just finishing. Our tour takes us to one of the 1200 farms that grow cotton in Australia. Cotton planting is rotated with crops, and how many acres are planted, or if it is planted at all, depends on available water. Every drop that is taken from groundwater sources and rivers is allocated and metered. A system of gravity fed channels irrigate the crops and a tail drain collects any run off, which is returned to the dam. It’s a very tough life: in a good year you may get 11 or more 227kg bales to the hectare, but the last good years were 2012 and 2013. This year the crop will be about 7 bales/hectare with the break even price of $400 a bale. This year the price is $640.

What more do you need to know? How’s this – gin is an abbreviation of cotton engine. Ginning separates the seeds from the fluffy stuff. Cotton seeds can be used as stock feed, and if the oil is extracted it’s flavourless and low in cholesterol. We don’t get to see the gin working – health and safety – but Faye, our tour guide has a mini gin to show us the process.

As with every tour you’ve ever been on, the exit is through the giftshop – in this case, Goondiwindi Cotton, a shop created by a cotton family to diversify by adding a garment manufacturing operation. Questions reveal not all the cotton is local, some imported from California which just seems odd, though all the manufacturing is still local.