Cotton Seed Distributors - Web on Wednesday

Research is currently being undertaken to ensure the smooth transition of Roundup Ready Flex to the Australian Cotton industry in the future.

Dave Moore, Monsanto

Dave you’re doing the regulatory work for Roundup Ready Flex in Australia. Can you tell us what that involves?

Sure Adam. What we’re doing, it’s a three-prong program this current season. We’re looking at composition and analysis work, which looks at the expression of the enzyme itself in the plant and looks at the composition of Roundup Ready Flex cotton to show that it is no different from other conventional types of cotton and we’re looking at a range of application scenarios because the resulting residue will drive the label.

We’re looking at a range of application scenarios, which will give us a range of residues at the end of the season and we’re also looking at crop safety work, where we’ve picked a best guess application rate for the technology and we’ve doubled that rate and tripled that rate just to show the APVMA that the technology is safe on cotton.

And what date are you working to have the registration for Roundup Ready Flex?

Well it’s a bit of a crystal ball Adam but our best guess at the moment would be that we would like to have it registered by the end of the first quarter in 2006. Now a lot of things and our work has to go well for that to happen but that is our aim.


Mark Oppenhuizen, Monsanto St Louis

Can you outline some of that work to us?

I’d be happy to Adam. We’ve been really pleased with the way Roundup Ready Flex has performed over the last couple of years. We’ve been focussing on selecting the very best event to bring forward to growers and to that end we’ve had field trials out at multiple locations over the last several years looking at field performance and everything. In addition to the field performance we also have to do an extensive analysis in the laboratory in terms of the molecular characterisation, the safety in terms of its composition and how it’s going to perform in food and feed all to meet the regulatory requirements in the United States, so all of that has gone very successfully and we’re really pleased with the results we are seeing today.

Ian Taylor, NSW Agriculture Namoi

The introduction of Roundup Ready Flex to the Australian cotton system is going to mean major benefits for growers in terms for their ability to control weeds, particularly longer in the season.

What we’re actually doing is we’re doing some work with the critical period for weed competition, so we’re trying to work out how with different species and different densities of weeds, what impact their going to have on cotton so that we can accurately determine when RR herbicides should be applied to the Roundup Ready Flex system.

Obviously one of the biggest things with the Roundup Flex system is the ability to put Roundup over a much longer duration. What that means for a grower though is when exactly should he be timing his herbicides and herbicide timing is going to be the most critical thing for weed control.

What we’re looking at is to work out when the economic yield loss is, which is determined as a 5% yield loss level and when particular weed species and particular densities will actually cause that yield loss. So what we’re looking at is to work that out with the different species, particularly lets say the grasses, which are very competitive early on in the season compared to some of the broad leaves, which have a greater competition later on in the season.

So when should we be coming in with out herbicides options? What options should we be using? If we’ve got high density weeds, we should be using Roundup Ready Flex in conjunction with some of the residual herbicides to get the maximum efficiency and best efficacy out of those treatments.

What we’ve done this year is we’ve looked at a range of weeds, the thorn apples, the noogoora burs, bladder ketmias and so on and also some of the grasses with very high to low densities ranging from one weed per quare metre up to around 200 weeds per square metre and working out what are our control is for those and what sort of competitive impacts they have.

We’ve then knocked out those weeds at various dates from 21 days after germination of the weeds right through to 90 days to work out when that critical period for weed competition is. So when Roundup Ready Flex is actually released to the Australian Cotton growers we should have an exact database that will allow growers to work out when they should be best applying the herbicides.


Richard Cathcart, grower Wee Waa

Richard, you’ve had a chance to have a look at some Roundup Ready Flex in some trials out here with Monsanto this season. Can you give us some comments about  what you think about Roundup Ready Flex.

Adam I think it’s been a bit of a privilege to have the trial here or as all trials are a bit of mucking around but the trial has certainly shown the future benefits of the Roundup Ready Flex technology and yes we are pretty excited about the future.

You’ve got some plots here that have had three times the RR rate on them. What do they look like?

Yes very surprising, the control sections have sort of been decimated to basically nothing and as you can understand at the highest rates. The Roundup Ready Flex variety is standing up there just as good as any and still at the same number of nodes and all the data is showing that the yield is there so yes it will be just interesting to see how the season finishes out basically.

Once this technology becomes available to growers so you think you’d be picking it up and using it?

Absolutely, the only thing that is really holding is back now as far as actual RR varieties is just the variety selection otherwise we would be 100%. We’re 40% Bollgard® II Roundup Ready® this year pure seed and we’d be pretty keen to get basically as much of this technology as possible on these older farms with a higher weed spectrum or a bigger weed spectrum than some other places, so we can certainly see a fit for it here at out place.


Peter Reid, Plant Breeder - CSIRO and CRC

The breeding program for RR Flex has been proceeding for a little while now. Could you give us a run down of the breeding objectives with this new material?

Yes sure Rob, well as I guess with most of their material obviously high yield is the pre-eminent thing we’re breeding for and we can’t really say anything  much about out Flex material at the moment, it’s pretty early days but obviously we’ll be endeavouring to get very high yields. Other major criteria is obviously disease resistance particularly fusarium wilt these days and of course verticillium but we are putting a lot of emphasis on the fusarium or have very extensive screening of our early generation material all the way through the program of the new Flex material so that’s one of our major aspect of our work.

The other major aspect I guess is the fibre quality. Fibre quality is becoming increasingly important. The discounts are getting larger, the premium ranges are getting smaller so we have to put a lot of emphasis on screening for the high quality and good stable quality under a range of conditions.

And you’d be aiming to have the Roundup Ready Flex available in a range of varieties for all the different regions?

Yes sure we’ll have it in a very wide range of varieties. We’ll have it all throughout. Different types from the shorter season types all through up to the longer season hot area types, so we aim to have a very good suite. We recognise how popular RR has been so the Flex with that extra flexibility in applications it’s obviously going to be very very popular with farmers and we believe that we want to have a bigger range of varieties as possible with it.

And that will be available in straight Flex and in combinations with Bollgard® II?

Yeah of course, we’ll have a good range of Bollgard Flex varieties as well as some straight Roundup Ready Flex varieties, so the exact break up in the market place is a little uncertain as we all realise at the moment but we’ll certainly have varieties that cater for both areas.

Further information:  Robert Eveleigh, John Marshall, or Craig McDonald