An Assessment of the Economic, Environmental and Social Impacts of NSW Agriculture's Wheat Breeding Program

The Wagga wheat breeding program has been operating for over 100 years. In that time, it has released a flow of new wheat varieties for wheat growers in south-eastern Australia. Those varieties have led to increases in both yields and grain quality. The average annual rate of yield improvement in NSW has been 3.2% compared to the average for Australia of 2.4% with a significant proportion of these productivity gains arising from new varieties. In this analysis, the investment in that program from 1980 to 2003 has been evaluated. Given the lags inherent in wheat breeding investments, the benefits from those investments are being measured from 1993 to 2020. The broad structure of the program has remained relatively stable for most of the period since 1980. The program consists of 2-3 wheat breeders, one breeder-pathologist, and a cereal chemist, with appropriate technical and field support, totaling approximately 15 full-time equivalents per year. The costs of the program have averaged approximately $1.2 million per year over the period. In assessing the Wagga wheat breeding program it is important to consider how the industry would have developed without the program. The benefits of the program were measured as the difference in returns from improved wheat varieties in NSW over that period and the returns that would have been achieved in the absence of the Wagga breeding program. The assumption used to determine the impact without the Wagga program was that the rate of yield improvement in NSW would have been the same as for the rest of Australia. For quality, without the Wagga program the assumption was that in southern NSW the increase in quality would have been 20$321 million. The economic benefits of the breeding program are shared by producers, processors and consumers in the wheat industry, some of whom live overseas. Because Australia is largely a price taker on world wheat markets and because the wheat processing and distribution sector in Australia is generally considered to be competitive, most of the benefits of the wheat breeding program are likely to remain with producers. However these gains are offset by declines in the world price in response to advancing technology throughout the world. These economic benefits have positive social consequences, largely through their contribution to the incomes of farmers and those who handle and process wheat in regional NSW. Some of these gains are in the form of new marketing and processing industries around the increasingly specialised industry segments resulting directly from the changes that have occurred in wheat varieties. Perhaps these new skills add to the social capital of towns in the wheat belt of NSW. In environmental terms, the wheat breeding program itself is not likely to have major impacts, since the wheat industry would have been very similar whether or not there was a Wagga breeding program. However, to the extent that improved productivity from the Wagga program's varieties has allowed an expansion of the wheat industry, there could be some negative environmental consequences of the breeding program, such as those arising from the clearing of land, increased cultivation and increased use of herbicides. On the other hand, the high levels of disease resistance developed and maintained has meant that wheat production is not associated with large-scale fungicide use, and hence the danger of chemical contamination of the environment is less than it would have been without the resistance developed in this program. Some of these environmental impacts affect the costs and incomes of wheat farmers and hence are reflected in economic benefits and some spill over to the broader community and have not been valued here. It is not clear that these social and environmental impacts would be much different without the Wagga breeding program, except through the extent to which the Wagga program has allowed the wheat industry in NSW to develop more than it otherwise would have. Without the Wagga program the slower gains in yield and quality would also be associated with some social and environmental impacts, and it is the difference that is critical in evaluating the Wagga program. The costs of this program have been met partly by the NSW taxpayers through NSW Agriculture and partly by the grains industry through levies from the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC). The recent introduction of variety royalty payments ("end-point royalties") has not yet led to significant funding, but may be expected to do so in the future. The nature of the outputs of plant breeding programs is that there are large economic benefits that flow directly to producers, processors and consumers in the industry. However the social and environmental impacts on the broader community, while not explicitly valued here, are considered to be small relative to economic benefits and relative to some other programs of NSW Agriculture that have been evaluated. Hence it is appropriate that the industry, though GRDC levies and royalties on production, has increasingly funded the operations of the wheat breeding program. Recent institutional changes for the wheat breeding program have made it even more commercially-based for the future and less reliant on government funding. The new institutional arrangements for wheat breeding programs and the strengthening role of the private sector in supplying varieties traditionally supplied by the public sector mean that the place of public wheat breeding programs is being re-assessed. A key question is whether publicly-operated programs, can offer some additional benefits either to the industry or to the community, which would not result from the complete privatisation of the wheat breeding sector. While those issues have not been addressed directly in this analysis, the results indicate that past investments in public wheat breeding program at Wagga have certainly been a productive use of public funds over the past 20 years or so.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Trends in Pulse and Oilseed Crops in Winter Cereal Rotations in NSW

The key aims in this study are to assess the current level of importance of pulse and oilseed (broadleaf) crops in winter cereal rotations in NSW, and to identify recent trends. The production of broadleaf crops has increased in each region of NSW, but different crops have been favoured. Canola has played a key role in southern regions, and chickpea in the northern regions. In many areas, pulse crops have been grown more because of rotational benefits than their direct gross margins. If recent trends continue, the role of broadleaf crops will increase to 25% of the area sown to field crops in NSW by 2020. However, that will only be achieved with a focussed effort in both research and extension activities.broadleaf crop, oilseed, pulse, production, rotation, NSW, Agribusiness, Crop Production/Industries, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Q160,

Do (and say) as I say: Linguistic adaptation in human-computer dialogs

© Theodora Koulouri, Stanislao Lauria, and Robert D. Macredie. This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is strong research evidence showing that people naturally align to each other’s vocabulary, sentence structure, and acoustic features in dialog, yet little is known about how the alignment mechanism operates in the interaction between users and computer systems let alone how it may be exploited to improve the efficiency of the interaction. This article provides an account of lexical alignment in human–computer dialogs, based on empirical data collected in a simulated human–computer interaction scenario. The results indicate that alignment is present, resulting in the gradual reduction and stabilization of the vocabulary-in-use, and that it is also reciprocal. Further, the results suggest that when system and user errors occur, the development of alignment is temporarily disrupted and users tend to introduce novel words to the dialog. The results also indicate that alignment in human–computer interaction may have a strong strategic component and is used as a resource to compensate for less optimal (visually impoverished) interaction conditions. Moreover, lower alignment is associated with less successful interaction, as measured by user perceptions. The article distills the results of the study into design recommendations for human–computer dialog systems and uses them to outline a model of dialog management that supports and exploits alignment through mechanisms for in-use adaptation of the system’s grammar and lexicon

Impact Absorbent Rapid Manufactured Structures (IARMS)

Rapid Manufacturing (RM) is increasingly becoming a viable manufacturing process due to dramatic advantages that it facilitates in the area of design complexity. Through the exploration of the design freedom afforded by RM, this paper introduces the concept and initial research surrounding Impact Absorbent Rapid Manufactured Structures (IARMS), with an application in sports personal protective equipment (PPE). Designs are based on the cellular structure of foams; the inherent advantages of the cellular structure are used as a basis to create IARMS that have the potential to be optimised for a specific impact absorbent response. The paper provides some initial results from compression testingMechanical Engineerin

Book Reviews

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

The cost-effectiveness of an updated theory-based online health behavior intervention for new university students: U@Uni2

Background: The transition to university marks a point where young people may be open to changing health behaviours such as smoking, exercise, diet and alcohol intake. This study aimed to estimate the cost-effectiveness of an updated online health behaviour intervention for new university students in the UK – “U@Uni2”, compared with both a control (measurement only) scenario and with the original intervention (“U@Uni1”). Methods: The economic analysis, based on a randomised controlled trial, comprised a detailed costing analysis, a within-trial cost-effectiveness analysis and long-term economic modelling. Cost-effectiveness of the U@Uni2 trial was estimated using 6-month data on costs and health-related quality of life. An individual patient simulation model was adapted for long-term economic analysis of U@Uni2. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis and value of information analysis accounted for uncertainty in model inputs and identified key parameters. Results: The U@Uni2 intervention costs £45.97 per person for full implementation, £10.43 per person for roll-out in a different institution and £3.03 per person for roll-out over five years. The U@Uni2 trial was not cost-effective because marginally fewer quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) were obtained in the intervention arm than control. However, modelled over a lifetime, U@Uni2 is estimated to produce more QALYs than control but fewer than U@Uni1, primarily due to the effect of the interventions on smoking. Roll-out of U@Uni2 is highly likely to be more cost-effective than doing nothing (ICER = £536 per QALY, 86% probability cost-effective). Decision uncertainty occurs primarily around the effectiveness of the U@Uni2 intervention and is worth up to £3.24m. Conclusions: The U@Uni2 intervention is highly likely to be cost-effective to roll-out compared with doing nothing. The results suggest that preventing uptake of smoking is the key driver of QALY gain and should be the primary target of such interventions. Trial Registration: Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN6768418

Mt. Lassen test site no. 56 Preliminary ground truth report

Microwave and infrared measurements of Mount Lassen surface topograph

Placing the university: thinking in and beyond globalization

In some respects, the impact of globalization on universities is well rehearsed (competition for international students; the drive for status in global rankings; the opening of overseas campuses; the dream of massive open online courses and other forms of digital education), but the relationship between universities as place-based institutions and globalization is less well understood. It is on that this chapter focuses. Drawing on work undertaken as part of an Economic and Social Research Council project (“Higher Education and Regional Social Transformation”) the author sets the arguments in a wider context. He explores the extent to which and ways in which universities have become key players in the reimagination of their city regions in a (neoliberal) global context. As well as reflecting on the wider public (and local) role of universities, he also considers how universities use the tools available to them to position themselves effectively as successful businesses within the new world in which they find themselves