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,

A signaling visualization toolkit to support rational design of combination therapies and biomarker discovery: SiViT

Targeted cancer therapy aims to disrupt aberrant cellular signalling pathways. Biomarkers are surrogates of pathway state, but there is limited success in translating candidate biomarkers to clinical practice due to the intrinsic complexity of pathway networks. Systems biology approaches afford better understanding of complex, dynamical interactions in signalling pathways targeted by anticancer drugs. However, adoption of dynamical modelling by clinicians and biologists is impeded by model inaccessibility. Drawing on computer games technology, we present a novel visualisation toolkit, SiViT, that converts systems biology models of cancer cell signalling into interactive simulations that can be used without specialist computational expertise. SiViT allows clinicians and biologists to directly introduce for example loss of function mutations and specific inhibitors. SiViT animates the effects of these introductions on pathway dynamics, suggesting further experiments and assessing candidate biomarker effectiveness. In a systems biology model of Her2 signalling we experimentally validated predictions using SiViT, revealing the dynamics of biomarkers of drug resistance and highlighting the role of pathway crosstalk. No model is ever complete: the iteration of real data and simulation facilitates continued evolution of more accurate, useful models. SiViT will make accessible libraries of models to support preclinical research, combinatorial strategy design and biomarker discovery

A global database of soil nematode abundance and functional group composition

As the most abundant animals on earth, nematodes are a dominant component of the soil community. They play critical roles in regulating biogeochemical cycles and vegetation dynamics within and across landscapes and are an indicator of soil biological activity. Here, we present a comprehensive global dataset of soil nematode abundance and functional group composition. This dataset includes 6,825 georeferenced soil samples from all continents and biomes. For geospatial mapping purposes these samples are aggregated into 1,933 unique 1-km pixels, each of which is linked to 73 global environmental covariate data layers. Altogether, this dataset can help to gain insight into the spatial distribution patterns of soil nematode abundance and community composition, and the environmental drivers shaping these patterns

Examining pharmacy workforce issues in the United States and the United kingdom

The objective of this item it to examine available data and actions surrounding current pharmacy workforce issues in the United States and United Kingdom.  Published pharmacy workforce data from the United States and United Kingdom were gathered from various sources, including PUBMED, Internet search engines, and pharmacy organization websites. Data was collated from additional sources including scientific literature, internal documents, news releases, and policy positions.  The number of colleges and schools of pharmacy has expanded by approximately 50% in both the United States and United Kingdom over the previous decade. In the United States, continued demand for the pharmacy workforce has been forecasted, but this need is based on outdated supply figures and assumptions for economic recovery. In the United Kingdom, workforce modeling has predicted a significant future oversupply of pharmacists, and action within the profession has attempted to address the situation through educational planning and regulation.  Workforce planning is an essential task for sustaining a healthy profession. Recent workforce planning mechanisms in the United Kingdom may provide guidance for renewed efforts within the profession in the United States

Mastitomics, the integrated omics of bovine milk in an experimental model of Streptococcus uberis mastitis: 1. High abundance proteins, acute phase proteins and peptidomics

A peptidomic investigation of milk from an experimental model of Streptococcus uberis mastitis in dairy cows has incorporated a study of milk high abundance and acute phase (APP) proteins as well as analysis of low molecular weight peptide biomarkers. Intramammary infection (IMI) with S. uberis caused a shift in abundance from caseins, β-lactoglobulin and α-lactalbumin to albumin, lactoferrin and IgG with the increase in lactoferrin occurring last. The APP response of haptoglobin, mammary associated serum amyloid A3 and C-reactive protein occurred between 30–48 hours post challenge with peak concentrations of APPs at 72–96 hours post challenge and declined thereafter at a rate resembling the fall in bacterial count rather than the somatic cell count. A peptide biomarker panel for IMI based on capillary electrophoresis and mass spectrometry was developed. It comprised 77 identified peptides (IMI77) composed mainly of casein derived peptides but also including peptides of glycosylation dependent cell adhesion molecule and serum amyloid A. The panel had a biomarker classification score that increased from 36 hour to 81 hour post challenge, significantly differentiating infected from non-infected milk, thus suggesting potential as a peptide biomarker panel of bovine mastitis and specifically that of S. uberis origin. The use of omic technology has shown a multifactorial cross system reaction in high and low abundance proteins and their peptide derivatives with changes of over a thousand fold in analyte levels in response to S. uberis infection