Shining the light on superior sugarcane

SUPPLIED BY SUGAR RESEARCH AUSTRALIA

The Annual Variety Selection Meeting focuses on the best performance.

Every year a pivotal event shines a spotlight on superior sugarcane performance to date and that is the two-day meeting of the Sugar Research Australia (SRA) Variety Development teams from across the industry.

This year the Annual Variety Selection meeting was held in Bundaberg in March. District teams joined the meeting from as far away as Cairns and northern New South Wales.

To the outsider, the meeting may look dull - just a group of people in a room presenting tables of figures and graphs on a screen to each other. But this is where the rubber hits the road in plant breeding terms and the discussions can become intense.

The most advanced sugarcane clones which have been developed and trialed for the past eight to ten years are being put through their paces.

District performance data is closely scrutinised for the best clones to put forward to the industry.

“New cane varieties form the foundation of SRA’s work to improve the productivity, sustainability and competitiveness of Australia’s sugarcane industry,” General Manager Variety Development Dr Jason Eglinton said.

“The SRA breeding program must identify and select parents for crossing with traits that will enhance their progeny’s performance to meet each district’s challenges. These parents come from the vast SRA germplasm collection of experimental clones, old and current varieties, and wild and foreign varieties. It is a huge library from which we can draw on lessons of past superior performance and incorporate the latest techniques to ensure a pipeline of strongly performing varieties for the future,” Jason said.

“SRA plants around 100,000 new seedlings annually as potential varieties for the future. It then takes between 10 and 12 years to evaluate the target traits and their performance in trials across crop classes and environments. Only a small number of candidates will have the commercial potential that survives the selection process.”

Every year new clones are assessed for their suitability for local release by six Regional Variety Committees

(RVCs). Each committee is presented with detailed data from new candidates compared to the relevant commercial varieties of the region. The commercial merits of candidate clones are considered against the local production constraints and challenges of each region and the strengths and weaknesses of the current mix.

The committee, comprising voting members from local grower representative organisations and milling companies, must vote unanimously on what should be released.

Productivity is the priority, so the weighting of tonnes of cane per hectare (TCH) and commercial cane sugar (CCS) is paramount. However, other characteristics that affect the agronomic fit of varieties are also considered including lodging, arrowing, suckering, side shooting, germination behaviour, and early vigour.

A range of milling and sugar quality parameters are also considered in release decisions.

Experimental clones advancing through the selection program are screened for disease resistance to smut, Fiji leaf gall, leaf scald, mosaic and red rot at SRA’s Woodford station; yellow spot, brown rust and orange rust at SRA’s Meringa Station; and Pachymetra root rot at SRA’s Tully station. This means disease ratings are available before commercialisation decisions are made.

The RVCs have a formal responsibility for biosecurity. Once a variety is released it is added to the Approved variety list for the region which is required to meet every grower’s General Biosecurity Obligation under the Queensland Biosecurity Act (2014). Cane supply agreements also commonly reference delivery of only Approved varieties.

Maximising profitability and minimising risk by adopting a balanced mix of varieties across a farm with different productivity constraints, disease pressures, and harvest timing can be a complex task. Good decision-making in variety adoption and management relies on good information about variety characteristics and performance.

Each year SRA publish Variety Guides for each region summarising productivity data, disease resistance profiles, agronomic characteristics, herbicide toxicity information, and increasingly maturity curves to support selection of varieties to propagate and evaluate on your farm.

Guides for the 2023/24 season will be released in the coming weeks.