CRDC's Annual Report for 2022-23 is out today, demonstrating some major developments in Australian cotton RD&E.
The five-year CRDC, GRDC and Goanna Ag collaboration – Weather and Networked Data, or WAND – is a ground-breaking project that has the potential to solve the spray drift challenge. This project represents the biggest single investment in CRDC’s history and the most significant move to improve spray application via RD&E. WAND provides real-time weather data and alerts about the presence of hazardous temperature inversions, and its uptake by growers and spray contractors could help cotton avoid $40 million in losses and costs associated with drift over five years.
WAND is estimated to have a benefit-cost ratio of $12.54 to $1 – $12.54 in benefit returned to growers and the wider industry for every one dollar invested via CRDC.
Another major investment is the four-year, $27 million, 30-partner collaboration focused on boosting agricultural production in Northern Australia – including enhancing cotton’s productivity, profitability and sustainability in the north. The Cotton Grain Cattle project again brings together CRDC and GRDC, this time with the Cooperative Research Centre for Developing Northern Australia (CRCNA), to address pressing research gaps in Northern Australia’s emerging broadacre regions.
These are just two of 189 projects that CRDC has invested in during 2022–23, all designed to deliver impact to growers, the wider cotton industry, and the community.
As these investments show, collaboration is central to all of CRDC’s activity. 100 per cent of the research projects that we invest in are delivered in partnership with our growers, collaborators and cotton researchers. We also partner with those outside our sector to solve issues that are bigger than cotton alone. In 2022–23, 28 per cent of our investments were in cross-sectoral RD&E. Of this, 11 projects were in partnership with our fellow broadacre RD&E organisation, GRDC, totalling $21 million in collective investment.
In the Annual Report, we outline the fifth and final year of our investment under the CRDC Strategic RD&E Plan 2018–23, and the resulting innovations and impacts.
