Pest, disease and weed management
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Research outcomes: A comprehensive RD&E program that addresses existing and emerging pests, diseases and weeds, allowing sugarcane growers to manage their crops efficiently with minimal environmental impacts. An enhanced industry capacity to deal with incursions of exotic pests, diseases and weeds.
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Item SmutBuster: accelerated breeding of smut-resistant sugarcane varieties : SRDC final report BSS325(BSES, 2011) Cox, MC; Croft, BJ; Bonnett, GSugarcane smut is caused by the fungus, Ustilago scitaminea Syd., and is one of the most serious diseases of sugarcane. At the end of 1983, only the sugar industries of Australia and Fiji remained free from smut. Sugarcane smut was reported for the first time in Australia in July 1998 in the Ord River Irrigation Area. Eight years later, smut was identified on the east coast of Australia at Childers. By December 2007 sugarcane smut was widespread and established in the Bundaberg?Isis, Central Queensland and Herbert River districts, and by 2010 the Mulgrave, Tully and Burdekin districts were also infested. The average yield loss reported in papers at the time of the east coast smut incursion was 6% yield loss for each 10% increase in per cent-infected plants. To minimise losses susceptible varieties will need to be completely replaced with equivalent/higher yielding smut-resistant varieties, as fast as possible. This would necessitate changing ~80% of the2006 sugarcane crop. Replacement of susceptible varieties will be achieved, not only by rapid scale-up of smut-resistant varieties, but also accelerated development of high yielding,smut-resistant varieties. The parental pool of high breeding value, smut-resistant germplasm was however severely limited, adversely impacting the core crossing program. Without a significant plant breeding response, the rate of genetic gain for productivity would decrease and fewer productive, smut-resistant varieties would be released from the BSES-CSIRO Sugarcane Variety Improvement Program. The SmutBuster project was a key component of the RD&E response to sugarcane smut with the specific objective of developing high yielding smut-resistant varieties through the utilisation of high breeding value parental germplasm with susceptible reaction to smut.Item Estimating disease-associated yield losses in breeding selection trials - Endemic diseases; Pachymetra root rot, orange rust and yellow spot(BSES, 2007) Magarey, RCPrevious work has shown that plant improvement stage 3 selection trials can be used to assess the relationship between yield and disease resistance with particular Queensland endemic diseases - principally Pachymetra root rot, yellow spot and orange rust. Results provide a means for fine-tuning the plant improvement program - ensuring that commercial varieties have just the right level of resistance to maximise high yielding ability while minimising disease-associated yield losses.In this study, data from 2003-series stage 3 (FATs) trials in northern and central districts were studied to determine the relationship between resistance and yield for Pachymetra root rot and orange rust. As yellow spot only occurs in the high rainfall areas of northern Queensland, analyses for this disease were restricted to this region only. Brown rust was to be included in the study but the difficulty is assessing disease resistance in FATs, and the lack of disease, made obtaining data to brown rust impossible. Additional data were available for Pachymetra root rot for northern series trials (1995-2004) providing more detailed information for this disease.