GRAIN growers could soon have access to all results from the National Variety Trials (NVT) program regardless of their fate, following ongoing lobbying from WA farmers affected by last year’s frost.
Since the NVT program was established by the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) in 2005, results considered too variable, damaged, drought or frost-affected were excluded from published NVT reports.
Concerns have been raised about a lack of transparency regarding the unpublished trials and the amount of control plant breeding companies maintain over the release of NVT results.
These concerns were heightened last year when field data from an unprecedented 38 NVT trials across Australia was abandoned due to frost, 34 of which were in WA.
Trials in the Eastern Wheatbelt were among those most heavily hit, including sites in Corrigin, Hyden, Merredin, Lake Grace, Bencubbin, Kulin, Moorine Rock, Mukinbudin and Narembeen.
In WA, the NVT program is funded by the GRDC on the back of grower levies, along with the Department of Agriculture and Food WA (DAFWA).
GRDC levies from WA growers contribute approximately $1.4 million each year for the 151 trial sites planted in the State.
Eyebrows were raised in early February when a decision not to analyse and publish the data was made by the independent auditing company that runs the trials – Australian Crop Accreditation System Limited (ACAS) – and commercial NVT participant companies.
After a flood of complaints, the data was eventually released by the GRDC in late February, in the 2016 Frosted Trial Report.
NVT senior manager Tom Giles has admitted the GRDC was unprepared for the widespread frost damage and should have been more proactive in communicating with WA growers.
“We got massive feedback, we were just caught completely off-guard as to the scale of what happened last year, that was just unprecedented,” Mr Giles said.
“We’ve maybe lost five or six trials, not 30.
“We should have been more on the front foot, there was no notification on the website as to the fate of trials and guys had to keep checking.”
GRDC managing director Steve Jefferies said frost-affected trial data had traditionally been withheld from growers to avoid misinterpretation.
He said the timing and severity of a frost event had more of an impact on a plant than its genetics, making the data unsuitable for head-to-head variety comparisons.
“How useful that data is for anybody is really marginal and it can be extremely misleading because if something flowered right on the point of time when you got a frost and something else flowered a week later, the one that flowered a week later could be up to 50 per cent higher yielding,” he said.
“Somebody will go out and say this variety it’s frost tolerant, or it’s higher yielding in a frost situation.
“Wrong, it just happened to be at that stage of development when that frost hit and that’s the large part of the variation.
“Historically if a trial is under those circumstances, rather than present the data and worry about the risk of it being misused, we just don’t present the data.”
The 60-page 2016 Frosted Trial Report contains a number of warnings prohibiting replication of any information in the document, in a bid to ensure information is not misused by breeding companies producing marketing material.
Warnings to growers about the lack of value in variety comparisons are also present.
Dr Jefferies said the GRDC would consider releasing information from frosted trials in the future, if data released this year was used appropriately.
“We’ve been lobbied by a lot of people over a lot of time who believe that it’s useful data and we’ve been saying, no it’s dangerous data,” he said.
“We’re all about increasing enduring profitability for Australian grain growers and if we can’t deliver stuff that we think is going to add to their profit or improve their profit, we’re really worried about it.
“We’ve just got to be careful, but in going forward we’ve decided to present this data in a way where we’re minimising the risk of misuse.
“We don’t see any reason – if there’s no evidence of misuse going forward – that we can’t continue that.”
Another common reason for the suppression of NVT data is when trials are affected by a coefficient of variation (CV) higher than 15 per cent.
Dr Jefferies said trials with a high CV were deemed to be affected by experimental error.
“That could be due to kangaroo grazing, it could be to poor establishment in that they had something wrong when they were setting it up, it could be due to variations in subsoil constraints under it and water holding capacity, it could be big rocks under major parts of the trial,” he said.
“There’s been some trials - particularly in the Eastern Wheatbelt - that have met that criteria.
“Severely droughted trials tend to be like that because what you tend to get is micro-variation in water holding capacity over a trial area and that leads to huge variation.”
Mr Giles said feedback from the 2016 Frosted Trial Report suggested the right balance had been struck, ensuring all data published was ‘fit for purpose’ while also providing growers with transparency.
He said the GRDC was “seriously considering” publishing data from all future abandoned trials with appropriate warnings.
“Rather than just have frosted trials, I think it would be a really good idea to have ones that are abandoned on CV, ones that are eaten by pigs or waterlogging,” Mr Giles said.
“We’d aim to probably include everything that was abandoned, at least that was harvested.
“At least people get the knowledge of what happened to their levy and the trial they’ve been driving past all year.
“We’d probably try and get that out between Christmas and the end of January, not the end of February.”
Former chairman of the Far East Agricultural Research (FEAR) Group, Brad Auld, is one of several growers in the Eastern Wheatbelt to welcome the change.
The NVT site at Moorine Rock is on his property, where two out the past three trials have been abandoned.
“I think regardless of what happens it should be publicised, even in the frost and the drought,” Mr Auld said.
“I tend to find you get more value out of the trials on a drought year because a lot of our years are very similar to that, so if you can see a difference in varieties on a drought year that’s an advantage.
“It’s still trial and error but you’ve got to have something to start with, you’ve got to have a platform to run with.”
FEAR chairman Ian Maddock agreed that growers often found information released on a poor year more valuable than results released following a good year.
“Some varieties are quite a bit better than others in a poor year and I think that’s valuable information, and that’s not included,” Mr Maddock said.
“Sometimes a variety will stand out and I think that’s more important to us than anything so we just want to know how it went.”
Southern Cross grower Callum Wesley said growers understood the effects of drought and frost on their crops, but still found the information released by NVT beneficial.
“Obviously if it has got frost affecting the trial then you’ve got to take it with a pinch of salt,” he said.
“To us, drought and heat stress at the end of the season – say at the end of October – that’s more of gauntlet to us than frost.
“In a poor season – which we do experience a fair few of in the Eastern Wheatbelt – we want to know what yields well in a bad season and we’re not going to get that information when they don’t release it.
“They are a valuable tool when they don’t wipe them out.”
Mr Giles said the GRDC had learned its lesson after 2016, and was working on implementing several improvements to the NVT program.
He said he would be liaising with agronomic experts, NVT National Advisory Committees and GRDC Regional Panel members to decide the best approach moving forward.
Mr Giles said frosted trial sites would be more heavily monitored in the future to ensure grower levies were not wasted, with each trail costing on average $8500 to complete.
“This year we’re absolutely going to be monitoring much more closely when those events come through,” he said.
“We’re going to have to get out to the sites straight away, inspect, and if we see frost damage then pull what we call a tiny tag, which is a temperature logger.
“If we’ve had a massive whack of minus three degrees, or minus four, or a couple of nights of that, you’ve got to make a call at that point as to whether actually you continue with the trial.
“The way it’s set up, if it’s going to be completely wiped out then you might actually make the call and say we can save 60pc of the cost of the trial if we walk away because it’s going to be no good.”
Mr Giles said the GRDC’s investment in the National Frost Initiative would also continue.
