Minutes of the Board Meeting Held On

Minutes: 17th February, 2009. 2005

Minutes of the Board meeting held on

Tuesday 17th of February 2009, at GRDC Canberra

In attendanceJoe CoadChairman

John HarveyDirector

Hugh Roberts Director

Chris ColeDirector

Will GolsbyDirector

Alan Bedggood NVT Manager

Neale SuttonNVT Operations

Item 1Apologies

There were no apologies for this meeting.

Item 2Minutes of the meeting held on November 21, 2008.

The date in the header was noted as being incorrect, so this was rectified. The action on page 4 of the minutes was modified to state that there would be a margin built in to the ACAS budget.

Item 3Business Arising From Minutes

The final copy of the Minutes from the November 21 meeting were seen as being true and correct.

Moved: John HarveySeconded: Will Golsby

Carried

Item 4Actions from previous meetings

The action for ACAS to build its own Variety Gross Income calculator has not been progressed. This has been put on hold until the pressure from the 2008 harvest and 2009 sowing seasons has decreased.

The action to change the budget lines in the ACAS budget and associated documents is complete.

The action to build in margin to the ACAC budget which will allow us to pay back the $200,000 pre-payment over 4 years is still pending; Andreas Betzner still has concerns with this. The communications budget has been increased to $60,000, with $50,000 being added to the 09 -10 budget line.

Item 5Minimum Disease Resistance Standards (MDRS) – GRDC Presentation and Conference.

The process for developing disease resistance ratings uses the NVT Pathology area on the NVT website at

There will be a separate table for each disease for compiling the disease ratings from each of the contributing pathologists. A template table is downloadable from the NVT website where ratings can be submitted by the pathologists and returned to the NVT office for adding to the master list of results.

Once all the data is complied, a teleconference between all the contributors determines the final disease resistance rating for each variety. The final disease resistance ratings are then loaded onto the members area of the NVT website and sent to all participating plant breeding companies.

A 10 day dispute resolution period is then initiated; once this period has passed the disease ratings will then become public. Results are loaded onto the NVT database and are available for use in publications such as sowing guides, etc.

Motion: The ACAS Board ratifies Alan Bedggood’s appointment to the Independent Assessment Panel for MDRS.

Moved: Will GolsbySeconded: Hugh Roberts

Carried

A teleconference was held with Rohan Rainbow from GRDC to discuss options regarding the introduction of a Minimum Disease Resistance Standards system. Juan Juttner (GRDC) was also present for this teleconference to help answer any questions.

The option of introducing a new MDRS logo for branding varieties was discussed. Concerns were raised about exercising sufficient levels of caution to avoid liability issues. If involved with MDRS, ACAS need to understand the risks, and have the confidence that the industry want the system in place. An understanding if breeding companies are “prepared to play” and become involved with the system will also need to be sought. ACAS board endorses further consultation with breeders and growers.

Motion: Clarify with GRDC what they actually require from ACAS regarding MDRS. Upon receiving a response from Rohan, implement a risk assessment of the MDRS ratings to seek our exposure to legalities and compile a liability assessment. Contact solicitor for advice. Actively push for the uptake of a MDRS system and logo, and email a copy of Rohan’s presentation to ACAS board members.

Moved: Chris ColeSeconded: Will Golsby

Carried

Item 6Correspondence

A letter from ASIC was received questioning why the 2007-2008 financial statements hadn’t been submitted to them. The submission was sent in, but contained an error in the way of a missed entry in a compulsory field so it was returned. A $270 late fee was received.

After deliberations with auditors and finances, the last invoice was submitted to GRDC for the July 2008 payment. The final payment of $8,345 was made.

The October 2008 invoice was recently submitted to GRDC but payment for that invoices has not yet been made.

ACAS are yet to receive any payments for the 2009 financial year but is still operating comfortably within the $436,118 prepayment.

Item 7ACAS Financial Report

Invoices to send to GRDC are all up to date. ACAS are tracking very well financially and operating within budget.

The board, in principal, agree that we need to create a profit margin. It’s required as a cushion for additional projects that come up. Interest earned by ACAS will remain as ACAS money, rather than being a GRDC fund, therefore it can be used to build the profit margin.

Action: To protect GRDC, ACAS need to develop a strategy for building a margin to allow for extraordinary opportunities. Seek advice on this from accountant. Aim to build up a reserve up to the amount of our float ($400,000) in 4 years.

Item 8 - NVT Report

Included in this report are the following items:

Expanded AGM minutes

NVT database Data Import Tool

2008 Trial Results

NVT Members area expanded

NVT GM Trial results and repercussions

Upcoming activities

Expanded AGM minutes

The minutes of the AGM have been compiled and are available on the member’s area of the NVT Online website.

There has been a deliberate attempt to include in the minutes

• a list of the signatories to the bank accounts
• the name of the company auditor
• the details of the insurance policies

An addition has been a record of the remuneration packages of the two ACAS employees.

The two ACAS employees are extremely grateful for the bonus provided by the ACAS board. It is certainly very nice to receive acknowledgement of our efforts in the GRDC review of NVT.

NVT database Data Import Tool

The Data Import tool developed for the NVT database had limitations but gave us the ability to load the non-NVT breeding trials into the NVT database for the first time. This enabled us to have all of the breeding trials in the same format and with a common set of names being used. However, this tool soon began to fall apart with bugs in the system.

Never-the-less, we progressed very well. But for these bugs, we would have had a dream year regarding data handling at harvest.

Improvements are envisaged for next year that will obviously clean up the bugs but will go a bit further as well.

2008 Trial Results

Receiving trial results from NVT trials has been very good across the board. The late rain in WA has meant that some results have been delayed. However, getting results from plant breeders has proven to be a new obstacle. Their concept of harvesting trials then waiting until after the holiday break to weigh samples will have to change in the future.

The METs (long term analyses) have been delayed for half of the crops because of these late breeders’ trial results.

The METs are due from the breeders this week (by Jan 30), a little later than their Jan 21 milestone. However, the delay has not been by the biometricians but the delay in getting ALL of the results together.

There have been 14 wheat varieties released this season. This must nearly be a record.

They are all listed on the NVT Online website under the varieties tab. However, there has not been very much in the way of supporting information (brochures, PBA documents) to be able to provide to growers.

There has been very few Canola varieties released which is a complete swap with wheat.

NVT Members area expanded

The NVT website Member’s area has been expanded to have a NVT Pathology area. This is accessible by both the state pathologists and the plant breeders and was initially set up for the Stripe Rust workers. The intention is to collect the disease scores from each of the pathologists and to collate them into a common file with common ratings.

This common file was then used by the pathologists for a teleconference to deliberate and develop a list of Resistance Ratings for all of the wheat varieties for eastern and western Australia.

The final list has been loaded onto the website with an email to all wheat breeders asking for any dissent before the results are made public. After a 10 day period, the Resistance Ratings will be loaded onto the NVT database and used in sowing guides, etc.

Triticale has since followed the same process for stripe rust, with the email going to the breeders on Friday.

Other diseases and other crops will be added to the service.

The main benefit of using the website is the transparency of the Resistance Rating deliberation process for all of those across the industry.

NVT GM Trial results and repercussions

On Thursday, Jan 15, the results of the two GM canola trials in the NVT program were released – i.e. flagged as visible on searches on the NVT database.

Thursday afternoon, the ABC recorded an interview with me regarding the results. I tried to play down the results by referring to the degree of error in trials and the limited value of the results from one trial. I assume that the interview ended up as a text file on the ABC Website.

Friday afternoon, the WA Minister for Agriculture office rang as Julie Newman from the Network of Concerned Farmers (NCF) was in their office raising hell about the poor performance of Roundup Ready varieties in NVT trials and that GM canola should now not be allowed into WA.

On Monday, more radios and newspaper journalists rang regarding comments about the NVT trials and about the NCF article. I made comments about the trials and results but tactfully avoided commenting about other people’s interpretations.

This flurry for comments continued on Tuesday but tapered off Wednesday to nothing on Thursday.

I did not in the original ABC interview but in all other conversations, raised the analogy of measuring the height of the tallest grade four student in the local primary school then asking what can be said about the height of grade four students across the state or country. Results from one trial do not give a lot of information about performance in other years or across the state.

A detailed report on the two GM trials was created and loaded onto the NVT website. However, the damage was already done. Hindsight is great. I should have had the report written on the day that the results were made public.

Upcoming activities

The next few weeks will see the METs published on the website.

This will then allow us to create the PDF files for each crop and for each state. These will have the trial summaries, disease resistance ratings, long term results and trial results all in one file for easy access, as we did for 2007. The only hold up will now be the grain test results being available.

The GRDC Updates start on Feb 10-11 at Wagga, Feb 18-19 at Adelaide, Feb 24-25 at Perth and March 4-5 at Goondiwindi. Somewhere in there is also the canola blackleg meeting (with all breeders) and the Adelaide meetings with the rust people and followed by the national wheat breeders meeting.

Item 9Closed Session – Trustees

A closed session was deemed as unnecessary and therefore did not occur in this meeting.

Item 10Other Business

The NVT review has recommended that ACAS remain as the managing entity of NVT.

Item 11Next Meeting

Next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 7th April at 9am. An apology from Chris Cole has already been received as he’ll be in New Zealand that day.

Meeting Closed: Tuesday 17th of February, 2009 at 2:00pm

Signed as a true and correct record

Chairman………………………………………… Date………………………….

Australian Crop Accreditation System Limited (A.C.N. 093 984 902)

Private Bag 260, Horsham, Victoria, 3402

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Minutes: 17th February, 2009. 2005

Australian Crop Accreditation System Limited (A.C.N. 093 984 902)

Private Bag 260, Horsham, Victoria, 3402

1/7