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Two new research topics completed by fourth year agricultural science students at The University of Western Australia (UWA) could play a key role in the development and adoption of grain varieties by WA growers.

Both topics come off the back of fourth year research project scholarships funded by Cooperative Bulk Handling (CBH) and, according to UWA Institute of Agriculture Director, Winthrop Professor Kadambot Siddique, they can make immediate impacts on the WA grains industry.

“One reveals that the royalty system used to fund most plant breeding could profoundly affect innovation, while the other shows we’re in danger of prematurely discarding some canola varieties that can still provide good resistance to blackleg disease,” he said.

CBH Senior Operations Manager, Value Chain, David Fienberg, said CBH was pleased to support such talented agricultural science students at UWA on projects of immense practical significance to WA’s grains industry.

“During the past four years we’ve proudly supported eight fourth year students at UWA on a variety of grain related topics and we expect their studies will have an impact,” he said.

Completing a double degree in agricultural science and commerce, Courtney Rose, whose family farms at Wickepin, researched the modern funding system for commercial plant breeding because of its important role in sustaining innovation and raising yield performance across WA.

“With public research funds increasingly focused on environmentally sustainable farming systems, growers rely more than ever on the private sector to deliver new grain varieties,” she said.

“For innovative companies to flourish, they must generate enough revenue to repay their investment in research and development, but no-one has compared, for fairness, the two royalty systems used today.”

Those two systems are the traditional ‘seed royalty’, where growers pay an upfront premium on seed for new varieties and the ‘End Point Royalty’ (EPR) system, where growers pay a lesser amount for their seed upfront and then pay a set rate per tonne when the grain is sold.

Ms Rose’s research, supervised by Professor Ross Kingwell, UWA School of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Department of Agriculture and Food WA and UWA Emeritus Professor Bob Linder, set out to define which system struck the best balance between profitability for the farmer and the plant breeder.

She used a computer modelling system to account for more than 5000 different scenarios that could affect the performance of a given wheat variety over 10 years of farming.

“Our model found that irrespective of the intellectual property right employed, being a seed royalty or an EPR, it was optimal for farmers to purchase enough seed to allow them to bulk-up their seed over one year.” Ms Rose said.

As a result of farmers bulking-up their own seed on farm and retaining it for use in future seasons, the potential revenue streams for plant breeders using seed royalties is reduced.

EPRs help overcome the problem of farmer saved seed limiting return on plant breeders’ investment. However, as an annual payment, EPRs could affect ongoing farm profitability and so Ms Rose set out to calculate what that effect would be.

“With EPRs usually around $3 per tonne, the EPR variety requires more than a 0.9 per cent yield increase over the variety subject to a seed royalty for a farmer to be indifferent between the two varieties in terms of profit. Once the yield advantage of a new variety surpasses 0.9 per cent, the figures look better for the grower,” Ms Rose said.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of EPRs is how they incentivise commercial innovation.

Despite representing a greater cost to farmers than a traditional seed royalty over a 10 year period, EPRs can create far greater revenue streams for plant breeders, especially if the variety is very successful.

For example, Ms Rose found that if a wheat variety paying an EPR was grown over 100,000 hectares for 10 years, it would generate as much revenue as if growers were asked to pay $20,457 per tonne for the seed to begin with.

The second CBH scholarship holder at UWA, Aanandini Ganesalingam, has made some valuable discoveries about existing varieties in the canola industry, which could help local growers make better informed choices on what to grow in their home regions.

WA has an especially troubling history with blackleg, which virulently swept through the local crop in the 1970s, slashing the burgeoning industry to just seven per cent of its original size.

Against this backdrop, growers have been judiciously choosing varieties and anxiously watching for any forewarning of a breakdown in blackleg resistance. In recent years, the Australian Canola Association has independently tested varieties at multiple locations across the country and published their disease resistance ranking according to how they performed.

Although a useful guide, the national variety disease resistance ratings, according to Ms Ganesalingam, may overlook important interplay between varieties and their growing  environments, leading to variable disease ratings over years.

“Several variables can affect a variety’s disease resistance rating in a given year, including whether it has several genes contributing to its resistance, or if it has a single major gene for resistance, but there are also environmental factors, such as the virulence of individual strains of the blackleg pathogen, climatic patterns, types of stubble the crop is grown on and the location.”

Constant changes in the Canola Association of Australia disease ranking categories, which are based on the performance of each variety over the previous three seasons, prompted Ms Ganesalingam to closely look at the patterns, examining seven years of data from across Australia. She found some varieties earmarked as losing resistance actually still held up well.

“The disease pressure experienced by a variety can change from year to year, based on factors such as weather and stubble source, but when encompassed in a longer term analysis, you see many varieties classified as having an erosion of resistance are quite stable in resistance.”

“Major gene resistance is significant in preventing disease incidence, however over time the  prolonged exposure of this form of cultivar resistance to diverse populations of blackleg enables selection of populations able to attack this form of resistance,” Ms Ganesalingam explained.

“My research indicated incidences where fungal spores residing on the stubble of major gene resistant varieties over summer were much more likely to break down the resistant varieties grown the following year.”

Ms Ganesalingam’s findings will be sent to the Canola Association of Australia to help iron out their disease ranking system and provide growers with a more dependable long term assessment of disease resistant varieties.

Her project, supervised by UWA School of Plant Biology Professor Wallace Cowling and Dr Cameron Beeck of Canola Breeders WA, was part of her double degree in agricultural science and economics.

Ms Ganesalingam, who also received a GRDC scholarship for her fourth year studies at UWA, will next year work as a statistician with the Department of Defence in Canberra, before returning to UWA and its Institute of Agriculture to undertake her PhD research.

Caption to Photograph:GanesalingamSiddiqueRose5.jpg: UWA 4th year agricultural science students and CBH Scholarship holders Aanandini Ganesalingam and Courtney Rose with UWA Institute of Agriculture Director, Winthrop Professor Kadambot Siddique.

Media references

Authorised by ‘Institute of Agriculture – UWA’ and issued on its behalf by
Brendon Cant & Associates, Tel (+61) 8 9384 1122
Winthrop Professor Kadambot Siddique (UWA IOA Director) (+61) 8 6488 7012/ (+61) 0411 155 396