The Australian Cotton Disease Collaboration (ACDC), an ambitious $10 million five-year initiative by the Cotton Research and Development Corporation (CRDC) seeks to shake up its approach to cotton disease research as it aims to define the challenge, co-design projects, and co-invest in solutions.
THE INITIATIVE: CRDC has invested in cotton disease research over several decades and yet disease continues to be one of the leading limitations in the cotton production system in Australia.
- The first initiative announced under CRDC’s new five year strategic RD&E Plan plan, Clever Cotton, ACDC embodies the industry’s bold, ambitious new approach to solving industry-defining challenges: a shift away from smaller projects to bigger investments with bigger outcomes and bigger impact.
- Through the new CRDC Strategic RD&E Plan 2023-28: Clever Cotton, CRDC is proposing a new collaborative approach to disease research to mitigate the economic impacts of disease.
- CRDC’s goal is to reduce the economic impact of current and emerging diseases of cotton to less than five per cent of the cost of production by 2028 through practice change and RD&E.
- Strategic partnerships are being sought from research, government, and commercial partners to understand the impact of disease, enhance foundational pathology resources and capability, and deliver tactical management and innovative technical solutions for cotton growers.
- To facilitate collaboration, CRDC has called for partners with the resources, skills, and capacity to submit an expression of interest (EOI) by 21 August.
THE BACKDROP: The toolkit to combat disease is not too big, not enough for the R&D to be able to challenge the rising impacts, and that’s where ACDC fits in.
- Australian cotton farms grew cotton year in year out through the 1980s and ‘90s, and that frequency of cropping allowed the disease inoculum to build up to the point where it has become a real production issue now.
- It is estimated that the disease costs cotton business 20% of its gross income per annum.
WHAT THEY SAID:
There’s a lot of work already underway in cotton disease R&D, and a lot of interested players. 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.
— Elsie Hudson
Innovation Broker
Cotton Research and Development Corporation
Disease is so multifaceted that the solutions will be, too. At one end of the innovation pipeline, it means looking at blue sky research that could transform disease control. At the other end it means chipping away at the ‘one percenters’—those incremental small changes that, when aggregated on-farm, can help growers claw back some of what we lose now. Disease is 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.
— Mick Humphries
Cotton Grower
Moree-based
