Cotton Seed Distributors - Web on Wednesday

Central Queensland cotton grower Hamish Millar explains why it is so important that Australia 'stays ahead of the pack' in terms of fibre quality and CSIRO plant breeder Greg Constable discusses the advancements in fibre quality made through plant breeding in the past 30 years.

Hamish what was some of the key outcomes of your discussions with the grower’s throughout the industry about whether they were being rewarded for quality or not?

I think the first and foremost thing is that - there’s probably a little bit of misconception when discussing reward. I think clearly that the reward is factored in the price. When we enter into a contract with a merchant I think that when you receive those dollars per bale, the rewards are factored in there and the challenge for the growers is to meet those specifications in the contract; so the reward is you’ve just to get everything right.

When you were speaking to people, you were asking how did they manage for quality. What were some of the ways that people are changing the management to achieve better quality?

It was really a number of factors that effect quality; climate, variety, crop management, but crop management is probably one of the key ways that we, as growers, can influence fibre properties and again I stress that you’ve got to get it all right like nutrition and irrigation; those things where you can really have an impact on fibre properties.

Of all the fibre quality parameters, what are the big ones that growers need to be striving towards to meet the demands of the world market?

As we discussed in the presentation, our reputation as a premium supplier of cotton is under threat and we’ve really got to raise the bar and that will come in a number of ways.

I think we’ve got to keep our micronaire around the 4 level, we’ve got to get our length longer, aim for an inch and five/16ths and our strength aimed at towards 40 grams per tex. We also need to make sure that the other characteristics stay the same or improve and that will really differentiate Australian cotton from the rest of the world.

Greg what are the key fibre quality attributes that can be addressed through plant breeding?

Most of them can be, some of them are easier than others. The important ones are length and length uniformity, fibre strength and micronaire, which has two components of fineness and maturity. All of those can be addressed quite significantly with breeding but the challenge is to get them all together and also to combine those with yield and our other important characteristics such as disease resistance.

So, for example, with fibre length there is a strong negative association between length and yield within a breeding family. Likewise with fineness of fibres there’s a strong negative association between yield and desirable fibre fineness so those challenges mean that it’s quite a slow process but all of those properties can be addressed by breeding.

What advancements have there been in the last 20 years through the CSIRO breeding program in terms of fibre quality?

As evidence for the fact that you can breed for them, our data indicates that the fibre length has been increased by three 32nds of an inch over those times comparing the varieties we had then with what we’ve got now. Strength has gone up about 8 grams per tex in that time, so there’s substantial improvements, but they’re not enough. I think we need to continue to improve those for marketing reasons for our cotton internationally.

Where does the future lie in terms of the CSIRO breeding program?

We have some very ambitious targets with fibre length and strength in particular to substantially improve where we are with those to continue the improvements that have been made.

With micronaire, which has those two components of fineness and maturity, we want to also address those and for example have varieties suited particularly for the northern and western locations that have a history of high micronaire to try and get some finer types of fibre to avoid the high micronaire discount.

Likewise we would need totally separate varieties for the south that had a more mature fibre to make sure that they don’t get low micronaire discounts in the cool seasons.

So it’s a very challenging task to have half a dozen different fibre traits that are all hard to deal with on their own but especially when you combine those traits it’s a numbers game and we need to just have large breeding populations to find the combinations that are what we’re after.

And we’re still striving for a longer fibre?

Yes, we have an ambitious target of at least forty 32nds in the program, in the medium to longer term and that’s probably the easier of all of those. If you only had to breed for fibre length I think we could probably make a lot of advances there quite quickly but combining that length with strength and fine fibre is the challenge.

Further Information:  Robert Eveleigh, John Marshall,  Craig McDonald or David Kelly