Assessment of cotton fiber quality has undergone a significant change during the past several years. The older, traditional practice of assessing quality by color, trash and preparation has been progressively replaced by reliance on instruments that measure various physical properties of ginned lint that are not readily obtainable with hand classing. Today, cotton quality evaluation is widely based on the use of high volume instrumentation, or HVI, which is being increasingly adopted all the way from producers to textile manufacturers. In my opinion, high volume instrumentation is one of the most significant developments of recent decades in the technology of cotton development, production, marketing and utilization. HVI technology still is evolving, with expectations that components now being perfected will greatly strengthen the capabilities of HVI to precisely measure the physical properties of cotton that are important to textile processing.

Most major pollution offences are criminal offences, which result in criminal proceedings against the offender. They are not civil proceedings commenced by another citizen for compensation. They are criminal proceedings commenced by the State through an appropriate prosecuting authority or enforcement authority such as, in NSW, the Environmental Protection Authority.

As a first step in developing a community education program about IPM it was decided to assess the knowledge and perceptions of members of the rural community to the pest management practices. The project "Assessment of the Potential for Community Based Education Programs on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in Cotton", was funded by the Cotton Research and Development Corporation and results of the .survey are responded in this paper.

The Environmental Audit of the Australian cotton industry was a bold initiative at a period in time when the industry was under severe pressure from well organised environmental lobby groups. One course of action could have been to "bury the head in the sand" based on the premise that the pressures would subside when the environmental fad lost momentum. This was not a course the industry regarded as tenable despite concerns within the industry that it would leave it even more vulnerable to attack. The audit was performed. The auditors chose to perform a "Scoping Audit", that is a broad view across the industry to look at the structure. initiatives and impact of the industry cm its environment as a whole. This is significantly different to on-site auditing where all input/outputs are monitored by chemical or physical analysis. The Audit was completed and released in October, 1991. It is now opportune to review the initial impact of the audit.

There are basically three ways of preventing cotton farm runoff from contaminating the riverine. environment: prevent all runoff from reaching a waterbody keep the runoff pure or purify it en route to a waterbody a combination of both, whereby all tail water and most surface runoff is recycled, with contaminants stripped from excessive runoff which escapes the farm.

At the Cotton Conference in 1990. I presented a paper which outlined the broad health and safety issues for the cotton industry in Australia. Health effects for the workforce included traumatic injury. noise induced hearing loss. chemical exposure, respiratory effects of cotton dust and climatic effects. Since that time, the Agricultural Health Unit has been involved in monitoring and research programs involving the cotton industry in the Gwydir and Namoi Valleys and a health and safety profile is being developed with the industry. Cotton industry worker risks are associated primarily with injury and pesticide exposure, although respiratory disease associated with cotton dust requires further research effort.

Raingrown cotton in Northwest NSW and Southwest Queensland is not grown on metre beds, rarely has aerial applications, relies to a large extent on stored water, uses little or no fertiliser and large areas are harvested with brush strippers. Whilst this production system seems a far cry from its irrigated cousin, the production costs and returns on a per bale basis are similar. Since the early 1980's raingrown cotton has grown from a fledging industry to become established as a reliable dryland summer crop. Dryland cotton producers now possess cotton specific planters, cultivators, spray rigs and harvesters. They have adopted management practices to ensure returns in all but the toughest of seasons. They forward sell cotton using innovative marketing tools. Only a major reduction in the price of cotton or a strong recovery in grain prices will see the expansion of dry land cotton stifled.

This paper looks at some of the differences between raingrown and irrigated cotton in Central Queensland, in particular: differences in basic inputs and differences between major problem areas. The important management practices and the research needs of the raingrown crop in Central Queensland are also briefly discussed.

The Australian cotton industry relies heavily on chemical pesticides for management of a diverse array of pest insects, weeds and diseases. Pesticide use is a major economic and environmental liability for the industry and all measures to reduce this dependence need to be taken. The bacterial pathogen of Helicoverpa, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is one avenue for reducing the use of conventional chemicals. Bt produces a series of endotoxins which are highly specific for particular insect groups and is thus ideally suited as an environmentally friendly pest control agent. One Bt strain is toxic to Lepidoptera and is being increasingly used for Helicoverpa control in cotton. Many chemical companies are investing heavily to produce efficiacious, reliable and cost effective Bt products and their use is likely to increase dramatically over the next decade. Coincident with this change the industry will see the release of genetically engineered cotton varieties which have been transformed to produce the delta endotoxin from Bt, making them highly resistant to feeding by Helicoverpa larvae.

The genetic material (DNA) of living organisms is structurally the same whether it is found in humans, plants, fungi or bacteria. This fact enables the genetic engineer to use molecular genetic techniques to transfer genes from one species to another and so produce, for example, transgenic cotton plants expressing bacterial genes for novel characteristics such as herbicide and insect resistance. This fact also makes it possible to universally employ related techniques to help in the genetic identification of individual people, varieties or strains in human, plant or microbial populations. Thus, the methods used in the compilation of human genetic fingerprints for the identification of people in immigration, forensic and criminal cases could equally be used to differentiate between plant species, cultivars and progeny in plant breeding programs, to identify the particular pathogen strain in an outbreak of plant disease, or to characterise the varieties of mycorrhizal fungi in an agricultural field. The sensitivity of such techniques rests in their ability to detect the rare or subtle differences that exist between the genes of one individual and another.