It was once a commonly held belief in central Queensland that, because the potential cotton growing season was a long one, earliness was not an important management consideration. Such a belief is now very much a minority view among the irrigated cotton growers. On the other hand, less importance is placed on earliness in raingrown cotton because it is an expanding part of the industry and other management considerations currently receive priority.

As the first presentation on this topic I would like to very briefly outline the major advantages of producing an early crop.

The fungus Colletotrichum orbiculare(Berk. et Mont.) v. Arx (Walker and Nikandrow, unpublished data) was found causing anthracnose on X. spinosum in several locations during a survey in south eastern Australia in 1984 (Nikandrow, Weidemann and Auld, unpublished data). Although usually causing only leaf and stem lesions, a few plants were found occasional ly which had apparently been killed by the fungus. Specific isolates of the fungus were pathogenic to x. spinosum in preliminary tests, producing symptoms of seedling blight and anthracnose on older plants.

Most herbicides are complex molecules and their decomposition often requires several different chemical conversions, each mediated by a variety of organisms. Until now the detailed investigation of the ecology of such organisms has been hampered because of the need to have sufficient quantities of h e rbicide degradation products for inclusion in the selective media r equir ed for their enumeration. The rationale behind the approach to the pre sent work is that each of the chemical conversions performed by microbes will be catalysed by enzymes. The quantitative detection of the genes coding for these enzymes in soil microbial communities should indicate whether or not a soil contains organisms able to degrade a herbicide and, if it does, whether the rate of degradation will be relatively fast or slow .,

Your committee has asked me particularly to focus on the technological needs of the industry. As a background to this it's worth talking briefly about the research councils and their evolution.

Genetic engineering involves the agronomic improvement of crop plants through the introduction of new genetic information (genes) originating from other organisms. Unlike traditional plant breeding, this is not restricted to genetic material from plants that can be sexually crossed with the crop plant, be they other varieties or wild relatives, but extends to all living organisms, from the simplest virus to the most complex animal. The universal code for all genetic information means that a plant can decode these foreign genes to produce a new product in its cells. Although the functional segment of the foreign genes might be recognised, the gene signals that control the switching on and off of genes ten_d to be unique to different types of organisms. To make a bacterial gene, say, function in a plant it is necessary to remove its own bacterial gene controls and replace them with appropriate gene controls isolated from a plant gene. Ev~ genes from other plants may require some modification of the gene controls if the donor and recipient plants are very distantly related. This construction of new gene combinations in a test tube represents the first stage in genetic engineering; the second stage is to get these essentially synthetic genes inro the crop plant. This latter process, called genetic transformation, is often difficult for crop plants, especially cereal crops, but has now been demonstrated for a wide variety of crop and pasture species such as rice, maize, luceme, white clover, tomatoes, potatoes, brassicas, soybean and cotton.

I have to tell you now that I will not be presenting such a perspective. In fact I will tend, in my address, to highlight some areas associated with consultancy and agronomy, where an increase in technology seems to be the only way to further understand the particular problem.

This can cover an enormous area because not only does technology intrude into every aspect of growing a crop, by the view of it can change drastically with each different farmer. Compare a man establishing himself on a 500 acre ballot farm in Central Queensland with the manager of a large corporate farm of over 10,000 acres in northern New South Wales.

Chemical Farming implies the use of chemicals for the control of insects, weeds and diseases. In this paper, I want to deal with the use of herbicides in cotton that can be used with, or as a substitute mechanical cultivation. I also want to consider how old products can be used more-effectively and how new ones provide more flexibility in operations. Whilst new opportunities can be provided with new chemicals, some opportunities have been lost with the old ones. Whenever a natural Ectosystem is converted to an artificial farming system amongst other things, weeds become a major problem, even to the point where financial viability is threatened.

The successful application of Agrochemicals involves an understanding of the:- target, product, equipment, droplet behaviour, and the environment.