Things are certainly getting complicated when the grains industry has to worry about the minute amount of phosphorus in grain, and how after grain is fed to livestock phosphorus residues in effluent can create problems in the environment.

Brian Rossnagel, a barley breeder from the Crop Development Centre (CDC) at Canada's University of Saskatchewan, told a recent Toowoomba seminar phosphorus residues were an issue in Europe and becoming a potential one for the North American grains industry.

That was because most phosphorus in grain was not available to chickens or pigs and was potentially polluting when it passed into the environment through their manure.

In the not too distant future plant breeders might have to look for ways of developing grain that reduced potential phosphate problems, an unusual approach to "value-adding".

Dr Rossnagel said while the barley and oat breeding team at the CDC focused primarily on developing feed varieties for livestock producers, they were conscious of the need to produce profit for everyone involved in the grain chain.

That meant, for instance, looking for better nutritional quality for livestock feeders and better processing quality for the feed manufacturers.

But things didn¹t always go as planned. The CDC program had concentrated on breeding hulless barley for pig feed and learned again the lesson that it had to carry the whole industry along if it wanted to move in a new direction.

He said problems had emerged with hulless barley, like the cost of segregation of different grains and inconsistent supply of the new varieties. Neither feeders nor processors liked having to change grain type during a feeding cycle.

The CDC had produced around 14 hulless varieties of barley since 1982 but probably would move away from that focus because it had also improved the quality of hulled varieties by reducing the percentage of hull.

Hull-less varieties once had a 15 per cent digestible energy advantage but now that had fallen to less than 10 per cent, diluting the added value of hull-less varieties.

CDC's new feed barley model was for large, uniform, plump grain that perhaps even partly peeled as it passed through the header.

Varieties that lost half the hull during harvest and handling might be the ideal feed grain, because research had shown that adding a few per cent of hulls to hulless barley gave better feed performance in pigs; there was some value in having indigestible fibre in the ration

In a final aside Dr Rossnagel came back to his basic message, that there has to be a dollar for everyone in the grain production chain.

With the release of the benchmark variety CDC Dolly with large, uniform, plump, heavy grain, better for rolling and steam flaking the Crop Development Centre had "raised the bar for western Canadian feed barley".