By CAITLIN CROWLEY
AUSTRALIA’s cotton industry is embarking on an ambitious plan to add $1 billion in new value to the sector over the next decade, starting by clawing back huge losses incurred by growers due to disease.
The Cotton Research and Development Corporation (CRDC) has committed to a $10 million, five-year initiative which will overhaul the nation’s approach to cotton disease research, aiming to reduce the economic impact of diseases to less than five per cent of the cost of production by 2028.
The Australian Cotton Disease Collaboration will pool the resources and skills of a wide range of partners, which will be announced next month after expressions of interest closed this week.
“We’ve had a lot of applications – a lot of applications from universities, commercial companies, government bodies and all the people that we hoped we’d get applications from, we have,” CRDC Innovation Broker, Elsie Hudson said.
“The response from industry and growers has been really good, I think everyone’s just excited to see us doing something a little bit differently and taking a novel approach to an old problem.”
Hudson said while the cotton industry had built up a huge knowledge bank through disease research in recent decades, breakthroughs were getting harder to find.
“We have a limited toolkit for managing disease, and with impacts rising, it’s time to shake up the way we do research and development,” she said.
“ACDC will bring together researchers, commercial partners, innovators and government agencies willing to help CRDC define the challenge, co-design projects, and co-invest in solutions.
“In September we’ll notify all the successful partners and then go into a co-design; trying to identify where everyone fits in and how people can collaborate together.”
Hudson said the project and investment scope should be identified by November.
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Moree cotton grower, Mick Humphries (pictured below), said he hoped the change in approach would unlock new solutions.
“All up, I’d estimate disease costs our business 20% of our gross income per annum,” Humphries said. “I want to claw that 20% back, so I’m excited to see what ACDC can bring.
“Disease is such a hard area to get meaningful R&D breakthroughs. We’ll get a head of steam on a promising solution and then, almost out of the blue, it’s back to the drawing board.
“ACDC is about bringing people together to attack the problem in a strategic, coordinated way – rather than the piecemeal ‘one project here, one project there’ approach the industry has relied on for the last 30 years.”
The ACDC is the first initiative announced under the CRDC’s new five year strategic plan, Clever Cotton, which is built on three pillars on investment; Paddock, People, Planet.
“Each pillar contains three themes, creating nine key investment areas,” the plan states. “By adopting this model, our RD&E will focus on industry priorities – be they emerging issues or long-term challenges – to leverage higher investment returns and champion solutions to deliver the greatest impact.”
CRDC Executive Director Dr Ian Taylor said RD&E that delivers transformation change was needed to meet the industry-defining challenges that lay ahead.
“Biosecurity, a changing climate, demographic shifts, digital disruption, evolving consumer expectations, automation, geopolitical unrest, urbanisation, and competing demands for resources; the challenges facing cotton growers are more complex than ever,” he said.
“Rather than smaller projects that, together and over time, add up to deliver meaningful solutions, we’re going to deliver bigger investments with bigger outcomes and bigger impact.
“Clever Cotton champions that approach.”
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Elsie Hudson said the disease collaboration was a really good example of how the CRDC can approach things differently under its new strategic plan.
“We’ve got an issue here that is so multifaceted and keeps kind of getting worse and we’re not able to get impacts so this plan has allowed us to shift the way we pursue disease research.”
“Being able to commit to funding for five years just gives research organisations and our partners an opportunity to go all in with us on this problem, as opposed to doing piecemeal, smaller projects.”
The Association of Australian Cotton Scientists’ (AACS) will be co-hosting its 2023 Australian Cotton Research Conference with the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba from September 5-7.