The intention of this report is to provide the Australian Cotton Industry with information on the performance of the 2008 crop in regard to content and short fibre content as tested by the AFIS PRO instrument, fineness as tested by the Cottonscan™ and calculated maturity. These results represent results for the second year of this survey with samples for the 2009 crop still to be tested and evaluated.

Nine hundred and eighty two samples from 32 varieties, 9 growing locations and ginned at 23 gins were collected by classing facilities and forwarded to and tested by CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering (CMSE) in the Cotton Testing Laboratory situated in Geelong. The results show that the 2008 crop had an average nep content of 355 neps/gram, an average of 26 seed coat neps/gram, and an average short fibre content of 9.6%. When comparing these results to the results from the 2007 1crop we note that the average nep content has increased by 85 neps/gram and that the average seed coat neps/gram, and short fibre content were similar.

When comparing the 2008 results to the current Uster Statistics and requirements by

international spinners2, one will note that the average results for seed coat neps and short fibre content are within standard and acceptable. However the nep content of 355 neps/gram is above the preferred 250 neps/gram. As was the case in 2007, there are large variations in nep, seed coat nep and short fibre content, which needs to be investigated further once all the samples for the three years have been tested and analysed.

The 2008 crop had an average fineness of 191 mtex, which can still be considered to be fairly coarse although it is slightly finer than the 2007 crop, which had an average fineness of 204 mtex. The average maturity was 0.78, which is less mature than the 2007 crop which had an average maturity of 0.85. As was the case in 2007, there are also large variations in the fineness and maturity values that need to be investigated further.