CSIRO Transport Network Strategic Investment Tool(TraNSIT) performs a mass optimal routing of vehicle movements between thousands of enterprises, and scales up to provide industry, domain or locality wide logistics costs. This provides the ability to test nfrastructure scenarios that reduce transport costs for thousands of enterprises nationally or with in a region. Transit accounts for features and costs associated with the transport of a commodity across the road/rail network. Transit has been set up for about 98% of agriculture transportion Australia, including, beef, grains, cotton, pigs, dairy, horticulture and rice. It has been used to test the benefits of road upgrades, regulatory changes and calculating transport benefits of strategically (or optimalIy) located processing facilities. For this project, Transit will be applied to estimate the transport travel cost savings several initiatives related to existing and potential rail enabled storage and handling facilities

Growers within the Mungindi Cropping Group felt there was a need to identify profitable summer crop options to grow under dryland conditions in the western growing regions. Whilst winter crop rotations are being used to assist in the reduction of issues such as crown rot and root lesion nematode the addition of a summer crop could add further benefit to the farming system from both a sustainability and profitability point of view. This project is now in its third and final year.

Provide research data to support growers in identifying pathways to incorporate summer crops as a means of improving farming systems efficiency.

This funding supported a workshop aimed to build industry capacity to respond to a biosecurity incursion. A gap analysis for cotton boll weevils was used. Participants worked through the process of an incursion and eradication, with Plant Health Australia (PHA) facilitating the scenario. The activity was delivered as a one-day workshop format where participants from the cotton industry – from growers, to Cotton Australia, CottonInfo staff and government stakeholders – were presented with a fictitious scenario of a cotton boll weevil detection in the Emerald cotton production region and worked through the process of how the pest would be responded to under national arrangements (i.e. the Emergency Plant Pest Response Deed).

• increasing understanding of national Emergency Plant Pest responses

• understanding the industry pest reporting pathways and drivers following the detection

of a suspect Emergency Plant Pest

• delivering effective communication to the cotton industry during a response while meeting confidentiality requirements

• preliminary analysis of available response strategies to eradicate cotton boll weevil.

• Identification of further gaps in preparedness

To maximise improvements in work health and safety, it is vital to have the best available evidence available to understand the risks that exist. In turn, this can help to define the best control solutions to reduce these risks and prevent injury. For the cotton sector, such information can be used with confidence by cotton growers to update and modify myBMP (Best Management Practices) information and enhance their health and safety systems/practices.

While the industry has made significant progress in addressing WHS, there continues to be room for improvement that will not only minimise the burden of injury and costs to cotton growers, but will also significantly reduce the devastating impacts that these incidents can have on individuals, their families and whole communities. Continued diligence and effective use of the injury data to guide improved practices, will be pivotal to facilitating this progression to safer workplaces for all in the cotton sector.

Man-made fibres were initially manufactured to imitate natural fibres for textile applications. With progress in polymer science and fibre engineering technology, many new types of specialty man-made fibres have emerged. These offer very strong functional properties, for example, super-high strength, super-high moisture absorbency, super-high elasticity, electrical

conductivity, flame retardance, antimicrobial and smart materials that can respond to changes in environmental conditions.

Cotton/polyester blends have been the largest volume application of cotton in blends, taking advantage of the preferred comfort properties of the cotton, particularly moisture absorbency. Integrating elastane with cotton has become a major trend in the last 20 years or so, resulting in new stretchy cotton/elastane apparels for sportswear, exercise wear/active wear, leisure garments and other close-fitting garments.

This project examined opportunities for cotton to be “up-blended” with newly emerging high value functional fibres. This was achieved by firstly a comprehensive review on emerging functional fibres, their properties and markets. Laws of blending were examined for predicting the diluting effect of functionality by blending cotton with functional fibres. Based on these reviews, a brainstorming session with textile researchers and a range of other considerations, a list of significant opportunities for high value blends of cotton and functional fibres are suggested to CRDC for consideration in planning future research activities.

Use of cotton in functional textiles can be realised primarily through two routes, namely, (1) functional treatment of cotton and (2) blending cotton with specialty functional fibres, although a combination of the two routes can sometimes be beneficial. This scoping study has focused on the blending route.

The study identified a range of emerging opportunities for cotton to blend with high value functional fibres, including opportunities with large volume market potentials, such as

• A wide range of conductive textiles, including antistatic, radiation and electromagnetic field shielding, and electronic or smart textiles for sensors, actuators, power/signal transmission and energy storage textiles. Blending cotton with different ratios of various conductive fibres can tune the final textiles to the required levels of conductivity for these products.

• High durability cotton blends. Typically, cotton fibres and ultra-high strength filaments (e.g., Dyneema and Kevlar) are spun into core yarns, or cotton and ultra-high strength staple fibres are intimately blended and spun into staple yarns. Markets for high durability cotton blends include durable jeans, motorcycle and other sports, industrial workwear, military apparels, etc.

• Heavy gauge winter and trans-seasonal knitwear. Wool and wool-blend knitwear are disappearing as wool supply diminishes. Pure cotton knitwear has low bulk (low warmth) and low resilience. The opportunity lies in blending cotton with retractable and elastane fibres/filaments to produce high bulk warm knitwear with cotton on the fabric surface to provide comfort.

• Fine gauge cotton-blend warp knitted fabrics. Warp knitting offers higher production rates than weaving, a wide variety of fabric constructions and large working widths. It has the potential to be used as an economical substitute for weaving in light weight fabrics. Very fine count strong yarns can be produced from cotton and man-made filaments by the core-spinning or wrap-spinning methods.

To support growth of a cotton-blended functional textile market, a number of “platform technologies” should be developed or investigated, including:

- Law of Blending for functional textiles. Laws for intimate blends on some properties are used for evaluating functionality compromise due to blending (dilution). There is more work to be done for different functional properties, blended structures and manufacturing methods. Functionality of a blend usually does not follow a simple addition or subtraction of the functionalities of its components. This gives room for optimisation of blends to achieve targeted functional properties within a price bracket

- Cotton-blend structures and manufacturing technology tuned for functional textiles. Currently, cotton blended yarns can be spun into intimate blend singles yarns and core- spun yarns using ring and rotor spinning methods, spun into wrap-spun yarns using hollow spindle wrap-spinning machines, or made into plied yarns on various twisting machines. Cotton yarns and other yarns can be combined into a union fabric during fabric-making. These different manufacturing technologies result in different levels of utilisation of the functional properties in the high-performance fibres in the final products. Improved understanding of the relationships between structure and functionality will help reduce the cost of production of cotton blends and market adoption of functional textiles.

- Functionality characterisation and differentiation. Many functional properties for textiles are adapted from other industries. Testing methods need to be standardised to facilitate product differentiation.

In summary, blending of cotton with functional fibres can lead to a wide range of new opportunities in high value markets for cotton and developments in this area should be supportedbyresearchinanumberoftechnologyareas.

In this project, a novel treatment was investigated to improve whiteness, brightness, softness and dye uptake of cotton yarn and fabric. It uses an eco-friendly amino acid treatment in place of highly concentrated caustic soda used in mercerization process. The treatment can be conducted in yarn package form without needing any additional or specialised equipment. The project has demonstrated through subjective assessment and spectrophotometric measurements that samples prepared by this process has higher whiteness and reduced yellowness. The treatment if flexible and desired fabric properties can be achieved by

treatment at both acidic and alkali pH thereby allowing this to be extended to blends with cotton.

The influence of the treatment on the mechanical properties show that fabric strength is increased. The dye pick is significantly improved for commonly used reactive dyes as well as direct dyes. The improvement in handle was evaluated by instrumental analysis as well as subjective measurements. The increase in softness is achieved in addition to whiteness, brightness, dye pick up and without reduction in strength which is not achieved by any other chemical processing of cotton.

Diminishing water supply, changing weather patterns and pressure to enhance environmental flows are making it imperative to optimise water use efficiency (WUE) on cotton/grain farming systems. Growers are looking for better strategies to make the best use of limited water, but it is still not clear how to best use the available water at farm and field scale. This research project investigated the impact of management strategies to deal with limited water supplies on the yield and quality of irrigated cotton and wheat. The objectives were: (1) to develop irrigation management guidelines for the main irrigated crops on the Darling Downs for full- and deficit irrigation scenarios, taking into account the critical factors that affect irrigation decisions at the local level, (2) to quantify the evapotranspiration (ET) of Bollgard II cotton and wheat and its relationship to yield and quality under full- and deficit-irrigation scenarios, and (3) to increase industry awareness and education of farming systems practises for optimised economic water use efficiency.

Objective (1) was addressed by (A) collaborating with ASPRU to develop the APSFarm model within APSIM to be able to perform multi-paddock simulations. APSFarm was then tested by conducting a case study at a farm near Dalby, and (B) conducting semi-structured interviews with individual farmers and crop consultants on the Darling Downs to document the strategies they are using to deal with limited water. Objective (2) was addressed by (A) building and installing 12 large (1 m x 1m x 1.5 m) weighing lysimeters to measure crop evapotranspiration. The lysimeters were installed at the Agri-Science Queensland research station at Kingsthorpe in November 2008, (B) 16 conducting field experiments to measure crop evapotranspiration and crop development under four irrigation treatments, including dryland, deficit-irrigation, and full irrigation. Field experiments were conducted with cotton in 2007-08 and 2008-09, and with wheat in 2008 and 2009, and (C) collaborating with USQ on a PhD thesis to quantify the impact of crop stress on crop evapotranspiration and canopy temperature. Glasshouse experiments were conducted with wheat in 2008 and with cotton in 2008-09. Objective (3) was addressed by (A) conducting a field day at Kingsthorpe in 2009, which was attended by 80 participants, (B) presenting information in conferences in Australia and overseas, (D) presenting information at farmers meeting, (E) making presentations to crop consultants, and (F) preparing extension publications.

As part of this project we contributed to the development of APSfarm, which has been successfully applied to evaluate the feasibility of practices at the whole-farm scale. From growers and crop consultants interviews we learned that there is a great variety of strategies, at different scales, that they are using to deal with limited water situation. These strategies will be summarised in the “Limited Water Guidelines for the Darling Downs” that we are currently preparing.

As a result of this project, we now have a state-of-the-art lysimeter research facility (23 large

weighing lysimeters) to be able to conduct replicated experiments to investigate daily water use of a variety of crops under different irrigation regimes and under different environments. Under this project, a series of field and glasshouse experiments were conducted with cotton and wheat, investigating aspects like: (A) quantification of daily and seasonal crop water use under nonstressed and stressed conditions, (B) impact of row configuration on crop water use, (C) impact of water stress on yield, evapotranspiration, crop vegetative and reproductive development, soil water extraction pattern, yield and yield quality. The information obtained from this project is now being used to develop web-based tools to help growers make planning and day-to-day irrigation decisions.

This project aimed to identify means to improve nutrient use‐efficiency in Australian

cotton production systems and to improve soil health/fertility. The NutriLOGIC DSS

provides an updated resource for cotton growers to manage soil fertility and cotton

nutrition. This program provides recommendations to optimise crop nutrition

through interpreting soil and plant analyses.

N use‐efficiency has been benchmarked and indicates the cotton industry

substantially over‐uses N fertiliser. The industry can safely reduce N fertiliser inputs

by about 25% without reducing yield.

The cotton industry can become carbon positive by adopting minimum tillage

practices, by incorporating all crop stubble, by including legume crops in the

rotation and reducing fallow times. Producing cotton using sustainable soil and crop

management and reducing our net CO2e emissions will greatly assist marketing

Australian cotton.

Soil health can be improved dramatically with legume cropping. Marked

improvements can be seen in the soil physical environment, chemical fertility and

biological activity in those cropping systems that include legumes. For example, the

cotton‐vetch‐fallow‐cotton rotation remains the highest‐yielding system and requires

very little N fertiliser and therefore produces low carbon emissions.

H. armigera is one of the major pests faced by the Australian cotton industry. Widespread uptake of transgenic Bt-cotton has reduced the costs and environmental and health impacts associated with the use of chemical insecticides to control this pest. However, genes for Bt-resistance have been detected in H. armigera, and the danger of resistance to the limited array of Bt toxins available to control Lepidoptera, means that novel biological methods of pest control continue to be of interest.

Recent advances in molecular biology have opened possible new control technologies. CSIRO‟s large genomics effort is delivering not only the complete genome of H. armigera, but has also sequenced many thousands of genes expressed in the midgut of larvae. Successful gene silencing by RNAi would allow us to exploit the genomics results for pest control. RNAi involves introduction of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) into a target species, resulting in highly specific gene silencing. By reducing the expression of any essential gene, RNAi could be used as an effective method of protecting crop plants from insect damage or of controlling the propagation of the pest insects themselves.

Using the limited resources available to this project, we asked whether any evidence of RNAi-caused knockdown could be observed upon transient expression of dsRNA in plant tissue. This approach proved to be challenging for a number of reasons, and no consistent and significant evidence of RNAi was observed in any bioassay. A small number of H. armigera genes, all expressed in the larval midgut, were targeted. The first four are known to be essential genes, and the fifth is an enzyme specifically required for gossypol detoxification. Initial experiments were conducted to test biosassays of larvae on Nicotiana benthamiana. These control bioassays on different plants showed that larval growth on control and mock-treated plants was quite variable; even when older larvae were tested, no significant effects were observed. The variability observed demanded that we have found it necessary to find a better experimental system. Results of control experiments using cowpea were encouraging, but no evidence for RNAi was obtained upon transient expression of the dsRNA constructs. This work suggests that a full-scale project to evaluate genes for their effectiveness as RNAi targets will be required, making use of transgenic plants, such as Arabidopsis or tobacco in the first instance.

To determine the various factors affecting the loss of activity of insecticides on cotton over time. To detetemine the relative persistence of the range of insecticides used to control cotton pests, particularly Heliothis spp.