The talks presented at the Beltwide cotton conference which will have the greatest impact on researchers, and the Australian cotton industry as a whole, will be the new transgenic insecticidal packages of MXB-13 from Dow Agroscience and VIP from Syngenta, along with the herbicide resistance packages of Roundup Ready Flex from Monsanto and LibertyLink from Bayer. While some of these products may never make up significant portions of the Australian cotton crop, others will. Hopefully in the next few years these products can be evaluated and the value of each to the Australian cotton industry be determined.

In terms of non-patentable concepts presented at the conference, the individual internode distance (IID), which was presented by Dr Tom Kirby from Delta & Pine land, may have a use for growers and consultants monitoring cotton crop development in Australia. Dr Kirby proposed a graph which showed the theoretical IID value at each stage of the crop's development. As crops became stressed the fell away from this curve (ie the IID became smaller). This could be a useful tool for Australian growers to identify a stress very shortly after it occurs and allow them to hopefully alleviate it before it is too late and yield adversely affected.

I don't believe that any information presented at the conference would have benefits specifically for the northern Australian cotton research project. Rather, the information is just as relevant to the traditional cotton growing areas in northern NSW and Queensland as it is to northern Australia. In particular, technology such as the insecticidal gene technologies should have a dramatic impact in both areas. I found the talks on cotton yield and yield composition the most relevant to my research and interests. As a result, there are other measurements related to yield composition in cotton, such as and possibly surface area, as well as the fruiting position that I will now be taking.