In this episode of the Hay Matters Podcast brought to you by LocalAg and Feed Central, host Jon Paul Driver is joined by Dr Allan Rattey, National Oat Breeder at InterGrain, to explore the future of Australian hay and forage production.
They discuss how cutting-edge technology is accelerating oat breeding, the importance of balancing yield with quality, and why fibre digestibility is a game changer for both sustainability and livestock performance.
Dr Rattey also shares insights into how InterGrain is delivering practical solutions to Australian farmers, including varieties tailored to unpredictable weather and dual-purpose crops that maximise flexibility and profitability.
InterGrain leads Australia’s barley and oat breeding programs, developing high-yield, disease-resistant varieties that are adaptable to diverse conditions.
Best wishes,
Jon Paul Driver 0:05
Welcome to the Feed Central Hay Matters podcast, your go to source for all things hay related in Australia. I’m your host, Jon Paul Driver in today’s episode, we’re joined by Dr. Allan Rattey. Dr. Allan Rattey is InterGrain’s National Oat Breeder. Before joining in 2018 Allan worked with Dow AgroSciences as the lead wheat breeder in Australia, where he oversaw the company’s national plant breeding structure and science. He was also accountable for Dow’s Southern Breeding Node – The Australian wheat breeding program. Welcome to the podcast.
Dr Allan Rattey 0:40
Good morning in Australia. Good afternoon to you Jon Paul over there, yeah, great to be on.
Jon Paul Driver 0:45
How did you get started into plant breeding? We’ll start with a little bit about you.
Dr Allan Rattey 0:52
So yeah, thanks. It’s a really interesting question. I grew up on a farm. I grew up on a dairy farm where fodder and feed was crucial to what we did. Of course, little country tech known called Murgon, not too far from Toowoomba, which is where Susannah is based, and Feed Central head office. And, you know, it was one of those things. I was always keen to be involved with agriculture. And I realised very early on that the family farm wasn’t big enough for two, you know, I had an older brother, so, so he was always going to win that race. And I thought, I want to stay in agriculture. Yeah, you need three things to live, right? You need feed. You need food, water and air. And how do I have an impact in any of those? One any of those things, I can impact feed, making sure that people have got food to eat. And so, you know, as a plant breeder, I don’t want to sound like I’m patting myself on the back here, and but, you know, we do have a tiny impact in that whole scheme, and that makes me feel really good. There’s a lot of challenges of what we do. There’s a lot of long hours. There’s a lot of occasions where you’re doing if basically feel like a farmer because you’re working, you know, sun up to sun down, and you go back to your hotel room, and you you keep plugging away with numbers and stuff, but you’re doing that because you want to make sure that to make sure that there’s, there’s plentiful options out there for farmers to grow more food for the world.
Jon Paul Driver 2:08
You mentioned numbers and I didn’t finish your introduction. Here you hold a Bachelor of Science and and a PhD in quantitative genetics from the University of Queensland. What’s quantitative genetics?
Dr Allan Rattey 2:22
Quantitative genetics, it’s a really fancy way of just saying that we can measure a lot of stuff in a lot of different environments at the same time with a high level of accuracy. That’s, you know, it’s basically quantitative, it’s just measurable. And yeah, so we spend a lot of time understanding the measurable differences between parents, between progeny of parents. And then as we get into genomics, we spend a lot of time in understanding how that all leads through as well. There is a lot of science in the background of what we do, don’t get me wrong. And as we specialise into different areas of quantum, genetics and and biometrics, or statistics, what are going to call it? And then genomics and and then pathology, and then there’s, you know, there’s and then, of course, across all of this, we also have to do chemistry, because we, not only do you want to have the most product, you’ve got to make sure that product is valuable. So you’ve got to understand that the chemical composition of the product that you that you were working with. So there’s a lot of elements to being a plant breeder. And I think the tree breeder who got me first excited about being a plant breeder was he described the plant breeder basically as an Orchestra. Orchestra, you know, you you’re not, kind of the expert in none of the instruments. You don’t quite know how to make the trumpet work perfectly, etc, etc, but you know how to blend them all on, how to optimise this one up and down to get the best result. So, yeah, that’s where I think that’s the most exciting part about being the plant breeder.
Jon Paul Driver 3:55
You just equated fiber digestibility and plant height to a tuba and a trombone.
Dr Allan Rattey 4:03
Yep. And there’s, they’re all just elements. They’re all just part of the package. We always have to breed a package that goes across, you know, 20, 30, 50, traits depending on what’s valuable and what’s not. And so, yeah, every, every little bit plays its part in the orchestra.
Jon Paul Driver 4:20
Now I do want to get to your modern goals, but I want to talk about how you got, how you moved from sugarcane to wheat to you’ve done work in corn and soybeans and now oats. What did that progression look like, and what are the similarities and what are the differences?
Dr Allan Rattey 4:39
Sugarcane was a really good place to start, because it was such a messy genome that you actually had a lot of time to understand the basics of quantitative genetics. So you’d spend a lot of time early on understanding the theory of quantitative genetics and the impact of selection and the average effect of gene substitution, all those really. Things that, Brett Mendel was talking about in the 1800s and and how you then basically just scale it up and scale it up and then scale it up. You know, the the time in Dow was amazing because, you know, I got to see what was going on. And, you know, corn and soy, the big crops, especially corn. And, you know, you got to rub shoulders with those, those people who are eminent scientists. And, yeah, that was, that was amazing, but that it all came back to the fact that you could have a discussion around the table, and you’d have these, you’d have these heads of department overseeing, you know, hundreds of US million dollars worth of research and but when it actually came down to it, you just had to remember your basic quantitative genetics and how to apply those sort of things. And so that was, that was amazing for me, and so, you know. And it was just striking how we could just have a discussion, you know, regardless of your title, basically. And it was, it was really eye opening. Sugar cane was a really great cop to work in CSIRO, spent a lot of time there, working in traits and pre breeding, as we call it, trying to understand what the individual traits have. For example, we spend a lot of time working on dwarfing genes in wheat and how that would actually impact on, you know, above and below ground growth, and what that meant for farmers, in a in a situation where they had that moisture, you know, in first week of March, 1 week of April, sorry, they could save into, if they could sell it at, you know, six inches or 150 centimeters, but they couldn’t if they could sell it at, you know, 50 mil. So, you know, there’s a, there’s a lot of differences there that we, that we work through and decomposing the plant from a physiological viewpoint. And understanding how trait by traits interact is amazing science as well. And and I was listening to Sabrina Greenwood, who was one of your episodes of a little while back, and you know the she’s talking about, there of 2050 AG, like, yeah, that’s exciting. And I’ve been a part of that journey very early on in CSRO and and I think that’s why in plant breeding, you know, there’s always a need for continuous improvement of in in plant genetics, in adaptation distress. And as you know, Sabrina was talking about, you know, there’s the all the risks coming through with climate change and understanding how you can tap individual parts of the system to improve and breed for adaptation to each in one individually, but hopefully breed holistically across all the traits that are disease and where the stresses.
Jon Paul Driver 7:36
That’s going back to that orchestra idea, all of that variety of traits.
Dr Allan Rattey 7:42
Correct, everything is connected. And if it’s not connected, if youdo something in isolation, it’s a data island that you can’t connect it. And it’s, it’s not waste of resource, don’t get me wrong, but it’s an inefficient use of resource. So we spend a lot of time in research resource optimisation as well.
Jon Paul Driver 7:58
You’re looking for the similarities in processes, the similarities and techniques for breeding oats that are very, very similar to what you would have used in wheat or sugar gain
Dr Allan Rattey 8:11
Correct. All of the contact genetic theory holds. There’s a few nuances around you know, between species. Barley, for example, has got a small genome, so it’s, it’s pretty simple. You got one copy of every allele, whereas for every gene for wheat and those, you got three. You know, that makes it a bit harder, of course, because it’s a hexaploid. Barley is a diploid. You know, corn is the easiest, of course, because it’s small and it is a diploid. Don’t tell any cornbread. That’s easy, of course.
Jon Paul Driver 8:44
I’ve recently thrown some rocks at our alfalfa breeding or Lucerne breeding programs in the States. Our corn yield has traditionally increased about 1.9% per year, while our alfalfa yield is actually flat lining. We had some good discussions around what might be causing some of those things. The real answer is, we’re running out of water in the west, so we’re growing less alfalfa on irrigated acres, and there’s more dry land production that’s dragging our national yield. But the point still stands, we’re not some crops are harder to make those consistent gains than others.
Dr Allan Rattey 9:23
Yeah, indeed. And, you know, genetically, the simpler the crop than the easier it is to make gain, of course. But you know, oats and wheat are big crops, sorry, big genomes. You know that we’re talking into 12-15, gigabytes. You know, barley’s two or three. I think corn is about same. So, you know that makes a difference. I’m not sure what alfalfa is, sorry, but I know that alfalfa is also a potential. Is it a tetraploid, multiple copies?
Jon Paul Driver 9:52
This is where I say I’m, I’m an economist and my knowledge on plant breeding is, is quite shallow. Yeah.
Dr Allan Rattey 10:03
So, you know, obviously corn has got some, lot of advantages going for it as well around investment. And I think that’s one thing that you know we need to just keep understanding is, you know, investment drives innovation. It doesn’t matter what part of the value chain you’re in. You know, if you don’t, if no one’s investing in your part of the value chain, you’re gonna fall down. And if one part of the value chain falls down, then the whole value chain starts to fall apart. So yeah, there’s a few tricks to that, but we’ve got to always make sure there’s investment coming.
Jon Paul Driver 10:29
So do we want to talk about investment in oatbreeding, or do we want to talk about the value the traits that we’re looking for today first? Because those two things are very interrelated, exactly.
Dr Allan Rattey 10:43
And it’s the chicken and egg story. Just putting it out there, the chicken came first, in my opinion, and so and so for me, the chicken is actually the traits. You know, what’s the target? You know? Because if you don’t have a clearly defined breeding target, then it’s impossible to make gain, and it’s impossible to therefore, attract innovation and investment for that innovation. So, you know, I when I presented today, if you were at AFIA 2023, when you were in town, Yeah? Jon, yeah, I spoke about, you know, genetic gain in a, you know, public breeding program versus a private breeding program. And you know, the the traditions in Australia and copied around the world normally that, you know, private breeding will go faster, you know, normally around, around two times, two times the rate of genetic gain per year than a public breeding program. And the major reasons that really is just scale, like we’re just, you know, we’re just bigger. We’re more streamlined. You know, we have more mechanics, you know, we have more robots in the systems, because we’re running big programs. You know, we can afford, we can afford to have better toys. Let’s just leave it at that. You know, one of the things that we’ve got here at integrating, for example, yeah, because we breed wheat barley notes, where the Australia, where Australia’s dominant barley breed program, we’ve probably got a probably got about two thirds, 70% of the market share in Bali. We’re probably about 20% of the wheat market share in Australia. That’s coming second, but hoping to go forwards in those in that area as well. But you know, because we’ve got, you know, a lot of plots, we have a robot seed packet that works 24/7, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, when we needed to, it doesn’t stop for morning tea. It doesn’t stop for lunch. It doesn’t complain when it’s hot or cold. It just keeps going, and it’ll pack more plots and now than a person would in a day. You know, when you’re running 24/7 it it really speeds up the process and lets it strike scale. When I was in CS row, he talked a lot about with the pre breeding people that get like that Sabrina was talking about. And I’d say, I’d always be that person pushing that okay, that’s really good. That’s really exciting technology, and you’re getting some great information. How do we do that 10 times faster? And then once we get that working, how do we make that 10 times faster again? Because that’s the scale that you need to be able to leverage, you know, something from the from the pre breeding, the public space, to the commercial reality, and make sure those investments have been made. Pre breeding actually come to fruition in the in the real world, in which is real world as farmers panic. It’s always so, you know, chicken and egg, back to that the chicken, what comes first is always understanding the value of the product. There’s a lot of science that goes beyond, you know, understanding how you get to that value, but that’s the primary driver. Do you have a product that’s valuable or not?
Jon Paul Driver 13:30
What are those valuable characteristics that you’re breeding for today?
Dr Allan Rattey 13:35
Our major focus in open hay in particular, really, is around, firstly, biomass. So we just need more of the crop.
Jon Paul Driver 13:42
Tons. We get paid based on tons.
Dr Allan Rattey 13:44
Yeah. And, you know, quality is important, don’t get me wrong. But you know, if you have a 20% yield biomass improvement for for a 2% you know, premium decrease, then it pays for itself, right? So, you know, it’s pure economics. And I think there’s a there’s a certain amount element of what happened previously, previous to integrate and joining the program, where there was a there was a lack of clarity of understanding that the true target and and so, you know, you know, one of the things that that private breeding always does is we, we listen to everybody, but then we go, okay, that’s all great, but in the end, Who’s the most important voices we’ve got to listen to? Listen to, and how do we make that economically work for everybody in this mix? And there’s always, we will always breed and select for lines that have got specific adaptation that, for example, are high quality but low biomass. Because quality and biomass or yield are always negatively correlated, doesn’t matter what crop you’re working in. You go up in one you down the other, you know, usually it’s protein. You go up in corn, you go down in protein with the grain. It’s pretty simple, because you’ve only got a certain amount of resources you can chuck into the into the crop. And so, you know, there’s a, there’s a lot of little levers to that, you know, in making sure that you’ve got that breeding target. You know, very clear. Front and center is interesting. Another analogy that I, that I use on occasions with when I talk about breeding targets is, you know that the breeding target is the Titanic. You know, we go along and we can change direction, taking me wrong, but it does take us a while to change the whole Titanic. If we, if we see an iceberg, we can check out some life rafts and make sure that we get some some products out there. You know, that analogy really comes back to saying, Okay, there’s a, there’s a specialty target over there. You know, it might be a very high quality. Growers are happy to accept lower biomass, but they want to be very high quality. So they might want to be very high sugar or high protein, or all very low neutral detergent, fiber, NDF. They might want something like that. So we can, we should be able, we’ll be able to find that if we know what we’re looking for, and we understand the value proposition of what that means, and therefore the opportunity cost of us either providing it or not providing it. And going back to the fact that you know, the reason why there’s so many people involved in plant breeding is, there’s a lot of challenges in agriculture. We just need to make sure that farmers have got lots of tools available in this, their work, in their farming system.
Jon Paul Driver 16:08
Maybe this is an oversimplification, but this is how, if you’re buying a forage product, you have to think about a couple of buckets proteins, one, fiber, digestibility, and sugar. Those are the three big buckets in my mind. Now I’m a I’m a Timothy grass grower, and I happen to know for a fact that you don’t get it’s not a protein product. I was just looking at a forage test for my Timothy grass, and it was 8.1% protein. And I’m actually really happy with that. I was also happy with the 47% NDF, which actually is really high, but the DNDF, the digestible portion of that was 55% so we’re talking about highly digestible forages, and then our the sugar on it was 16% these are universal numbers, right? That almost sounds like, yeah, that almost sounds like an open hay crop, right? As I think about the forage product that that hay field has gone to Japan in the past. It has. It didn’t this year, but in past years, it has. So we’re participating in the same markets as Australian oat and hay producers in the same export markets. Anyway, as you’re thinking about the products that you’re breeding today for the future, there’s going to be an interplay between drought tolerance, biomass, quantity, the tonnage, and then those other three things that I talked about, the protein, the fiber digestibility and the sugar. Can you take me through the interactions? I mean, those are the big buckets. How do you balance those things in your mind?
Dr Allan Rattey 17:49
So it’s great question. Thanks, John. And I think the first thing is, how you select for those traits and and if we, if you’ve got genetic variation, is genetic variation bigger than environmental variation. So if we drill all the way down to it, but at the highest level, we need to be able to make sure we can discriminate or select biomass is challenging to do. Traditionally, we’ve done it by hand. Now we’re in a situation where with some research connections that we’ve got through agrifutures, who’s a funding organizations in with some of the phenomic centers, there’s a really good node, Australian plant breeding, Australian phenomics. Sorry, a PPN is the acronym Australian plant phenomic network. Network. There’s a couple of nodes that I’m working with the moment, one in Queensland, at UQ, one at University of Adelaide in particular, doing a lot of work there. So we’re now using LIDAR combined with hyper spec and hyper spectral analysis, and then where you’ve got the cutback version, and then you’ve got the full version that you strap on someone’s back. So we talk about need the sun, so that’s the person who goes out and, you know, does the hard work. Everyone else just stands around and watches the drone fly again. Look at how, look at how clever we are. But the trick there is that, you know, we’re now talking about, you know, being able to get rid of the bottom half, or the bottom two thirds, for biomass quicker.
Jon Paul Driver 19:21
That’s about the speed of the breeding program, right?
Dr Allan Rattey 19:24
Correct and the scale. And you can have scale without speed. And then there’s a in quantitative genetic theory. There’s a formula that was developed, you know, I’m gonna say, probably 150 years ago, around genetic gain equals three things divided by one thing. The three things at the top, selection accuracy, genetic variance, which is size, scale and repeatability, and then it’s all divided by time. Now, obviously time you need to, also you’re an economist, you need to put dollars into that.
Jon Paul Driver 19:54
Absolutely.
Dr Allan Rattey 19:57
The biggest thing in time is actually is how long it takes. So if you can cut a year out of the breeding program, instead of dividing all those things at the top by 15 or 12, which is what I can prove to the dividing by eight, bang, you’ve just gone forward. Huge, right? So by us being able to go, this is the bottom two thirds, we’re getting rid of it this year. Means that we can actually, instead of starting with a couple 100 lines, we can start with 5000 lines, and the chances of us finding that literal needle in the haystack, which is the kind of like dad jokes, and never get old, yeah, finding that, finding that needle in the haystack, you know, that verified biomass line that also has got good, you know, acceptable protein digestibility and sugar becomes greater. And that’s what we’re that’s what we’re about integrating. So, you know, the investments we’ve made in this technology, you know, through agri futures and and the A PPN at the University of Adelaide, you know, it’s, it’s going to change how we’re doing it. We’ve at Instagram. We’ve been doing it for last few years, but our accuracies are not as good. So we were able to get rid of the bottom third but now getting to the bottom two thirds, it just makes it it’s just a game changer.
Jon Paul Driver 21:11
How new is that technology, that particular application of that technology?
Dr Allan Rattey 21:16
Yeah, it’s been around for a long time. I mean, LiDAR, that’s kind of how you know, Tesla started out with this, with the self drive automation, but the the hyper spectral analysis that’s been around for a while as well. But it’s actually understanding how to put a drone up at, you know, 60 meters and find the plot that’s, you know, four meters long by a meter wide. That was the that was the challenge, and then how to turn all those pretty pictures into numbers, like looking at numbers, but I much prefer looking at numbers. Sorry, I like looking at pitches.
Jon Paul Driver 21:48
But now the numbers actually tell the story. Yeah.
Dr Allan Rattey 21:51
That’s the quantitative part, right? You need to understand that. So, you know, once you start to get numbers, that’s that’s great. And so now that we’ve got what’s called feature extraction technology, you know, pipelines, where it turns these pretty pictures into numbers overnight. It just, it just changes everything. So, yeah, the next step there, of course, is making sure that we can, you know, tap into satellite imagery from, like, you know, planet, the planet satellite, for example, they’ve got a, it’s called a leaf. They call it a leaf imagery service, you know. And they’ll do some of these traits as well, on a, you know, on a bigger scale, bigger than what we can handle at the moment in our breeding situation. But, you know, it’s legal to think about in, you know, two or three or four years time to taking it to the next level, letting growers be able to say, you know what, this is a high value paddock, or this is a low value paddock.
Jon Paul Driver 22:36
I mean, that leads to economic returns, right? I have conversations with growers all the time about knowing your financial numbers. In this exact instance, we’re talking about the same things, which paddocks are making you money and which ones aren’t. And then how do you change it?
Dr Allan Rattey 22:51
Can you change it? Of course, but can you change it? So back to your question around the quality once you’ve got biomass, you know, once now that we’re working through biomass, the next thing is to work through with with quality. The really exciting part about these hyperspectral technologies that we’re using so these are shooting the one from the drone shoots, you know, 400 to 1000 nanometers at the crop. One from the from the backpack does 400 to 2500 nanometers. And so we’re able to start to get a really, really good digital representation of the plant.
Jon Paul Driver 23:23
That’s the wavelength of the light that’s being shot at the plate, yeah, okay, yeah.
Dr Allan Rattey 23:30
And then rebounding back, yeah. So it shoots it and it rebounds back, yep. And the really exciting part now is if we’re starting to get some accuracies for WSC that are, that are attractive. And you know, in me, that we can actually start to understand, is this a high value? This is a high WC crop or a low WC crop?
Jon Paul Driver 23:49
It’s that same selection process, right? Biomass, first sugar second is what you just told me.
Dr Allan Rattey 23:56
The second, okay, yeah, and sugar will be related to fiber digestibility. It’s, highly related to starting fiber, NDF and ADF, really, and not highly related, but it’s related.
Jon Paul Driver 24:07
It’s related, positively correlated, is what you’re saying. Well, it’s negatively correlated.
Dr Allan Rattey 24:14
And, but, but you want to, you want to load NDF, you want to low fiber anyway, right? So that’s good, yeah. So it’s kind of, it was actually technically a negative correlation.
Jon Paul Driver 24:22
Okay, yeah, I understand what you’re saying.
Dr Allan Rattey 24:25
It’s positive, negative, if that makes sense.
We’re trying to skin multiple cats with the at the same time, effectively. So yeah, and this technology starts to mean we can, we can have a multi layered approach and attack many of the traits simultaneously, which is fantastic.
Jon Paul Driver 24:45
That’s amazing. I mean, I have a background in econometrics and multivariate regression. This is what you’re doing, correct, right? I know exactly what you’re doing, you
Dr Allan Rattey 24:55
know? So in the end, once we start to get all this working. In the field situation, then we can start to once we have a phenotype that we can select for, then we can start to do the genomics. And yeah, so we’re now, we’ve got a small investment from agri futures in genomics that’s going to also leverage a lot of dollars that we’re putting in at integrating into genomics and into green in wheat and barley, we’ve developed one of the premium freely available chips there is steep chips, which is just genomic term that are used by USDA, for example, you would use it as well in wheaton barley. So we’ve done that in collaboration with ag Vic research there in Melbourne. And so we’ll just we’ll look, we’ll go apply the same attributes in, you know, it’s when I was in in Saskatoon, I was talking to a couple of the US people there, and the Canada guys there, and we’re looking to sort of see if we can start to build a Bitcoin genomics globally using that same sort of technology. And again, it’s, it’s, it’s crop agnostic. It doesn’t really matter. It’s, you know, the technology is the same, which is the great thing about prevent crops, you know, and animals, animals are the same. They’re just a whole different species, if you know what I mean. But yeah, it’s the same.
Jon Paul Driver 26:08
Well, as you were talking about your rapid selection processes, I was thinking about the genomic testing they’re doing on dairy heifers. Now, the the rate that they can test heifers and get them into a breeding program is, it’s just staggering. Yeah, ABS, absolutely staggering.
Dr Allan Rattey 26:27
It is. And we’re in a situation that that, you know, in wheat, barley and into green, that we can now, we can now basically say, Okay, this is going to be a good variety, you know, categorize 123, is going to be good. It’s going to be really good. It’s going to be average, or it’s going to be bad. And we can, we can we can do that just from DNA, and we can do that much earlier than we used to. And you can, you can skip a couple of years of the breeding process, a selection process. Yeah, it’s, which is, you know, again, that’s, you think about the genetic gain formula. That’s just the attacking that bottom layer. Time you do it faster. And because it’s actually, it’s actually more accurate and effectively cheaper to do it in in silico, in situ, in, you know, in DNA, you can actually climb up the top, because you just have bigger numbers, full scale, scale, and doing it faster, bigger and faster.
Jon Paul Driver 27:15
Bigger and faster. Now, Norman Borlaug is perhaps the most famous plant breeder, and we were talking about those dwarfing characteristics, he was the leader on that in wheat, right?
Dr Allan Rattey 27:28
He was one of the scientists involved in it. What, what Norman was able to do, develop a system. And, I mean, don’t get me wrong, great guy. I had a discussion recently with, with a friend around organic food versus, you know, what we do? There was a few bits and pieces around. And I said, Well, maybe the biggest problem that plant Brennan has done is enabled there to be a few more billion people alive in the world without food. Yeah, you know. And then you think about what Norman Borlaug did back then, when, you know, in the 50s and in the early 60s, when India was an importer of wheat to then being an exporter a few years later. So what, what Norma boiler did a great job of we could probably go back live now, is what he did a great job of, was understanding how to fast track all of the technology that was coming the dwarfing genes, and linking that with agronomy, and then linking that also with Z resistance. So he did the develop the Contra season nursery between Al baton there at Mexico City, basically, yep. And irrigation at obergon, yeah. And I had lots of, lots of skilled workers working with him. He just fast tracked everything, increased scale, increased accuracy.
Jon Paul Driver 28:35
And you went exactly where I wanted you to go. I mean, my understanding, he had a breeding program in the US. He had a breeding program in Mexico. He was breeding. He was carrying those traits back and forth and accelerated his breeding program. Is that happening in your work? Or is it just, are you using technology instead?
Dr Allan Rattey 28:53
No, but we actually use both. So what Norman was doing was two generations a year. We now do four. So basically we have speed breeding that we use given the early phases of the breeding program or selection phase, just to make sure that we can get things generically fixed as possible as quickly as we possibly can. So, you know, we grow things under light 22 hours a day and constant heat, so that they, instead of being from planting to harvesting, normally taking, you know, in a glass house. Normally you take, you know, 20 weeks in the field, depending on whether it’s winter or summer, it’ll take, you know, 20 weeks or 30 weeks. We’re now doing it about 10 or 11, 1011, weeks. So we’re basically just, you know, decreasing the selection in the generation cycle time. So therefore we’re getting more generations through in a year. Which means, again, thinking of that genetic gain formula, we actually just take time out of the equation, which means can’t go faster.
Jon Paul Driver 29:44
That’s amazing. That’,…
Dr Allan Rattey 29:46
I don’t know whether that’s whether that’s the whether that’s the drummer or the guitar, but that’s, that’s a real key element in that orchestra of just speeding things up.
Jon Paul Driver 29:55
That’s increasing the tempo I get it, the stuff that you’re. Working on today. When will it be commercially available? We just, we’re talking about the speed of these breeding programs and the speed of the selection process that should result in recent new research hitting the farmers paddocks faster, right?
Dr Allan Rattey 30:15
And that’s, and if it doesn’t hit the farmers feel we’re all wasting our time, right? So, you know, that’s that’s what we’re all about. And so at integrated right now, we’re trying to understand how to make sure that we can get these new varieties adopted by growers. We’ve actually got a couple new products out that are quite exciting and are better than the previous Fridays, but it’s actually a trick to get growers to take up a new oat and pay variety for two reasons. One, they know what they know, and they like what they like, and it seems to work for them. So, you know, maybe they don’t need to change. Next thing is, you got to make sure you got seed available, because the target is actually not grain, it’s fodder. So you actually you like what you see you harvest. You go, great, that worked perfectly. Oh, wait, I’ve got no grain left, and then…
Jon Paul Driver 30:58
Nobody harvested the grain, and you have no seed to plant. Yeah.
Dr Allan Rattey 31:01
Yeah, exactly. So there’s a balance that we’ve got to work through. But, you know, there’s a, there’s we’re definitely working in that space right now. Breeding is a long term game again, sorry. And, you know, we talk about, so what was happening previously, they were talking about 12 to 15 years from across to release a new variety, where we’re now aiming for more like, yeah, that nine to 10. The lines that I’m most excited about are the ones that have come through this for nomic, as we call it, the other drone phenomic selection, and they’re now probably about two or three years away from being three or four years away from being released. We’ve got a couple of new lines right now that we’re excited about. One of them is actually leveraged out of our grain program. So that actually is a really good, good attribute, because it’ll actually, you know, growers can therefore de risk their farming system. They can say, okay, you know, especially if they’re in an area where they can deliver oak grain to a meal or to a feed lot, you know, they can, they can say, okay, cool, I’m gonna grow this variety. And if it, if it looks like it’s going to make a great hay crop, I can pay prices as high I can kind of hay. If hay prices are not good, they can. They can take it for granted. So that that flexibility, that dual purpose flexibility, of oats is, is quite, quite exciting compared to most of the other cereals and some of the other crops. But the we do have a few new lines coming, we are continuing to work with some of the other lines that we’ve already got around. So integrating, in partnership with Gio, released two variety, one called King Bar, one called Archer, and they’re the first, or currently, the only, varieties out there that have got any resistance built into the background. So it is a single gene, so integrate by sowing IBS. But what that means in, we know, in sort of northern New South Wales, Queensland, where there’s a lot of innovex chemistry gets, gets put out over summer to control weeds. Now, farmers have got another option that they can actually plant one of these immune, tolerant varieties into that system. And and therefore, again, it’s just having farmers having systems, you know, tools and networking. The system.
Jon Paul Driver 33:09
Remind me what that chemistry controls.
Dr Allan Rattey 33:11
I’m actually not that sort of a chemist, but it can control, you know, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of grass weeds. And in particular, is what it is, what it controls. Yeah, brome grass is the main one.
Jon Paul Driver 33:22
Gotcha Downey Brown, probably, yeah.
Dr Allan Rattey 33:25
it’s a very widely used chemical, chemical in in agriculture, Australia here too. And where you have, yeah, and where you where you have that, you know. So you know, flame or century, or, you know, one of those products are, and what that enables growers to do is now they’ve got an opportunity. They can plant a crop in the ground. In March, they were normally the soil abuse, sitting there, there, if they got moisture, it’s way and they’re producing feed that they can either graze or they can, you know, they can take it through hay, and it just gives them more options.
Jon Paul Driver 33:59
That flexibility is amazing.
Dr Allan Rattey 34:02
And if you know, it’s in the end, one thing that I’ve learnt over the years of and I’ve been in agriculture for pretty much all my life, is that it’s not actually as much as having an upside. It’s all about de risk for farmers. And that, you know, understanding the you know, it’s great to have something that’s going to be temps and I you and a good year, but if it’s 20% back in a badge, you don’t want to, because that’s that’s too much.
Jon Paul Driver 34:24
It increases the volatility in that case.
Dr Allan Rattey 34:27
Correct, correct, Yep, yeah.
Jon Paul Driver 34:29
We haven’t talked a lot about root structures. I’m not too different. The seasonality is different. Of course, we’re growing our hay through the summer instead of through the winter, but water is our biggest limiting factor, just like it is for most oat and hay producers in Australia, and that access to water has everything to do with the roots. I’d love to hear your thoughts on roots.
Dr Allan Rattey 34:55
Have you? Have you ever come across an emu or an ostrich? Yes, the ostrich. Great joke where you bury your head in the sand, and unfortunately, that’s effectively what we’re doing in notes at the moment, directly, because we’re actually not assessing roots. What I will say is that above ground biomass is related to below ground root systems. The one thing we know for certain is that the longer the root system is growing for the bigger it’ll be. So, you know, roots grow at a roughly a centimeter a day. Doesn’t matter whether it’s wheat, barley or oats. Early oat roots typically grow a little bit faster than wheat and barley, a little bit more vigorous. Early on, oats have what’s called a mesocotal as well as a Coleoptera. So you can plant oats deeper than wheat and barley. So you can plant oats. So you know, corn has a mesa coddle as well as a coli optical so you can actually plant oats down to, you know, 100 millimeters under soil. And you know, as long as the soil is not too hot, it should come up, whereas wing barley, you can’t do that. So there’s, again, you know, having a having an opportunity, you know, remembering we’re a different season, of course. You know, if you’re, if you’re planning in, March, April, you got moisture down there. You can, you can go out with oats. You can’t go out of wheat and barley, because you can’t get down down that deep in the source to what come through. But yeah, as far as overall root biomass goes at a big above ground crop equals a good root system. That’s the learn that I’ve got from the work I did with CSRO in wheat, and I’m just deploying it at the moment. I do want to go dig up some ground butter and dig up some blocks, I really do, and check it out for…
Jon Paul Driver 36:30
I did just learn something, because we actually plant our oat crops at the same time as you do, but we’re planting coming out of our winter like, yeah, the 28th of March, maybe, as I think when we planted last year. Now for us, the snow is just gone.
Dr Allan Rattey 36:53
You obviously you’re not going deep at all, because you’re trying to get a shallow so get it out of the ground as big as possible.
Jon Paul Driver 36:57
We’re trying to do fall tillage before the snow, and then get in, get that ground to warm up as much as possible in the spring. And, yeah, yeah. I just thought it was one of the oddities that came to me, is we’re planting our oat and crops at the exact same time.
Dr Allan Rattey 37:16
It was quite interesting because when I was in Saskatoon, you know, in, I think it was August. I was there and so, so, you know, I planted all my trials in sort of April and into market, and most of their crops were planted around the same time I left in Australia, and nothing was booting it. You know, that booting phase over there, everything’s, you know, powered, you know, it grows.
Jon Paul Driver 37:36
It grows different here, for sure. Yeah, yes, yes, indeed, the longer days here also makes a lot of difference.
Dr Allan Rattey 37:44
Oh, big time. Big time. Yeah, it’s all about thermal time. And you know, thermal time is a big player in all of this. And day length plays a big part in thermal time. When you talked before about roots, John, and for me, it’s a big passion. When I was in CSRO, a lot of the work that I was doing was around improving water use efficiency. And then remembering, in Australia, we’re growing it through winter. And so what we’re what we’re doing now is as we shift the sowing window forward a little bit in notes, gray notes in particular, a bit in hay oats. So we’re sowing more into April than we used to. And what that enables the crop to do, assuming it germinates, of course, is it enables it to get up and it’ll be that pitch you got behind you. It’ll be at that growth stage as the weather starts to cool off, right? And so what do we know about water use efficiency? The biggest driver in water use efficiency is exchanging water for carbon. So transpiring when VPD or vapor pressure deficit is low, when vapor pressure def is low, it’s lowest in winter. Yeah, usually less wind, lower daytime temperature, lower and higher immunity. So your vapor pressure deficit or VPD is lowest in Australia in winter. And so by by altering the sowing window a little bit forward, and making sure you’ve got a crop happily pumping away, you know, growing transpiring, photosynthesizing, etc, in winter, the bigger the crop is going to be, the better water efficiency it’s going to have. So that interface with agronomy and farming systems is crucial.
Jon Paul Driver 39:16
Oh, absolutely. What’s something that that you would want growers to know?
Dr Allan Rattey 39:20
I guess the biggest thing that, you know, I want to grow us to know is that we’re working really hard business, you know. And I mean, I can talk about, you know, investment and how much money it costs and that sort of things, but, you know, everyone’s spending money. I get that it’s just around making sure that effort is rewarded. And so, you know, in Australia, we have what’s called an endpoint royalty system. And so, you know, hopefully growers, you know, are doing the right thing and declaring what they’re growing, because that’s that’s going to make sure that the investment continues, as you know, Sabrina Green was talking about, you know, as we go into a changing climate, you know, we don’t quite know exactly what works now. Is it going to work in 2050 you know? So. That we’re always breeding will mitigate, you know, we’ll have continuous improvement to mitigate those impacts of climate change. You know, it’s a, it’s an expensive game that we all play farmers Tech and a lot of money as well. So it’s around rewarding investment and the hard work that’s put in, that’s, that’s one thing, and the next thing is that, please let me know what your targets are at the moment, you know, I get a lot of people saying different things. Your clarity around is going to crude protein, fiber, data, disability and sugar, which is, which is effectively what I’m working towards. You know, is great, but understanding the value of those three things versus tons, I guess, is the next part of it.
Jon Paul Driver 40:39
And what’s the thing, what trade offs you’re willing to make?
Dr Allan Rattey 40:43
Yeah, it’s precisely what trade offs economically a grower is willing to make. And then the other thing is just logistics. The bigger the crop, right? The harder it is. That to knock down to button and then to windrow and trail, and it’s drying Windows dry. Yeah, yeah. You know, if you’ve got a variety that can cure or dry down a day faster, that’d be huge. That would be huge because it’s, you know, as soon as you, as soon as you, I don’t know what the weather forecasting systems are like in your part…
Jon Paul Driver 41:15
Equally bad.
Dr Allan Rattey 41:18
You know, you know, we spend a lot of time trying to make sure that we’re taking our samples at the correct growth stage. But in the end, and I know this from firsthand, we bail a lot of stuff on my family farm. You know, you’re sitting there basically, okay, it’s gonna cut this in the next two weeks. Basically, you’re looking at the weather forecast. When am I gonna have, you know, five, seven days of clear weather? So, you know, understanding how if there’s any genetic variation, then we have got a little project at the moment that we’re working with to understand if there’s gene variation in curing time is something that I think would be quite exciting if we can find it. But, yeah, there’s understanding that trade off between tons and quality and how tons impact, you know the logistics of cutting the crop and getting it in the shed.
Jon Paul Driver 42:04
So it’s the middle of January here, and we just had our middle of winter. We just had our Northwest hay Expo, and one of the featured presentations was a dairy nutritionist, and she shared with us that she’s in charge of feeding about 90,000 animals between milk and cows, heifers, calves, and on a and on more than one dairy. It was a very alfalfa Lucerne oriented audience, and they spent a lot of time, a lot of time talking about fiber digestibility. And for me, the most important part of that whole conference was growers listening to the actual end user. So I want to ask the actual end user way down the line from where you’re at today is maybe a Japanese dairyman. Do we have efficient systems to get that information back from a Japanese dairyman?
Dr Allan Rattey 43:03
Yeah, and so all of the, all the in Australia, obviously, there’s, you know, domestic hands, export Hey, yeah, Australians and those sort of people talk to me quite regularly. And, you know, gilmac and balco and and Johnson. But you know, they talk to me, and fiber digestibility is, is one of the key attributes and, and there’s two components. So one is just making sure that that all the energy is being used, right? The next part of that becomes actually in a greenhouse gas emission system, because if you’re, if you’re actually producing biomass that effectively just goes out the back end of a cow, that fiber is unused, then, you know, it’s a, it’s a greenhouse gas. THG, inefficient, inefficient system. So you want to make sure all that, all of that fiber is digestible across, you know, 242, 40 hours. And so, you know, I’d love to have some, some more research and understanding, you know, how, how that fiber, fiber digestibility, changes across time with varieties, and the impact on greenhouse gas because sooner or later, when the world has stopped paying for carbon and it was quite interesting when I was in Saskatoon in August for this conference. You know, there were farmers there assuming they’re going to get a check from the government for their carbon credits. And whereas over here, we’re working with a lot of different consumption and so you know how globally this plays out, it’ll be important as well. Don’t get me wrong, if one can be working on a different GSG system than another country, that’s going to be a big, big impact, but we all know that it’s important. Yeah, well, greenhouse gasses can all interact with that, yeah.
Jon Paul Driver 44:39
What I just learned is we’re producing the seed. We’re transporting it, growing it, harvesting the crop, processing it, shipping it again, and feeding it. And that might be fed on the other side of the world, and if that fiber isn’t usable, we just shipped it all the way. Across the world to create a pile of manure somewhere else. That’s yeah, and the fiber part is not what’s valuable for. Well, there’s a little bit of water holding capacity in that fiber if you apply the manure to a field, but that’s not actually the economic value that you’re looking for.
Dr Allan Rattey 45:18
Yeah, the more that goes out the back end, the more greenhouse gas emissions as well. So absolutely, yeah, because you’re putting inputs in to grow the crop, and then, you know, I don’t know how much diesel gets used to to grow the crop and get it to from, you know, from the Pacific Northwest to Tokyo, it’s so hot
Jon Paul Driver 45:36
Yeah. The reality is, maybe, on a per unit basis, not very much, but the whole scale of the industry. I mean, one, one or 2% difference in fiber digestibility could be a lot of greenhouse gas emissions across the whole industry.
Dr Allan Rattey 45:55
Correct, correct, yeah, huh. And then agriculture is sorry when you go.
Jon Paul Driver 46:00
No, that was just a light bulb coming on over my head. I understand now.
Dr Allan Rattey 46:04
And agriculture, yeah, and agriculture is actually, you know, there’s a lot of people out there saying that we need to change agriculture because it’s such a big emitter. But you seen, and there’s a lot of bit, a lot of talk in Europe about that, and they’re actually backtracking a little bit now with regards to policies and procedures. But I think everyone, and everyone realizes that, you know, you need three things to live, right? You need one of them is food. So agriculture.
Jon Paul Driver 46:28
I love the research that’s going on at entergreen. And with all of these things being considered, there’s a lot to sort through. So I definitely appreciate the work that you’re doing.
Dr Allan Rattey 46:38
And and it’s, you know, it is always that global connections that we need to build. You know, for example, I spoke about drones and feature extraction. The first people we worked with there were was the University of Purdue. Oh, yeah, they’re there, yeah. So, you know, it’s, we’re on a global platform. Obviously, we we act local, but we do think globally. Yeah.
Jon Paul Driver 46:58
Wonderful. I love how everything is so similar. Whether we’re talking about my Timothy grass or your oats, it’s all it’s all very similar.
Dr Allan Rattey 47:10
So on before I opened just stability. I know you guys are using dairy one. We’re trying to use feed test, but we actually do have some some reasonable accuracies now for 30/120/240 hours.
Jon Paul Driver 47:28
We had some good discussions amongst labs at our Northwest hay Expo too, and all the labs need competitive differences while still maintaining the integrity of the testing in the industry, you really should be able to take a sample, subdivide it, or rather, take that sample, set it off to the lab, ask them for a portion of that sample back, and send it to the to a different lab, and get a relatively like there’s still going to be variability. Don’t expect the exact same test result to come back, but it should be close, and that’s good and healthy for the industry. But at the same time, then how do the labs compete besides price? So we had some really fascinating discussions around metrics, around fiber, digestibility. Some like the total track NDF. Some like just EDF and NDF, some like going to tdn. There’s all these different metrics out there, and the labs are trying to differentiate, and the customers have to use that information for it to actually be valuable. I don’t have any answers here. It’s just a fascinating discussion. Do we use 30 hours, or do we use 40 hours? I don’t know. Sorry, 240 hours, I don’t know.
Dr Allan Rattey 48:45
Yeah, and actually, and all that, if that point, that’s where you got to intersect with the animal nutrition is because at what point does it become irrelevant? Like you would, you’d assume 240 hours, that’s 10 days like me thinking to myself, I’m assuming it’s all gone in. It’s all gone out within, a week, at least.
Jon Paul Driver 49:01
That would be my assumption, too. But there’s got to be reason that you right…
Dr Allan Rattey 49:08
But the technology that we’re using now there was developed by someone who works at the University in an animal lab. So okay, fine. Obviously there’s 240 hours. It surprises me, but yeah.
Jon Paul Driver 49:21
I’m gonna say I don’t know.
Dr Allan Rattey 49:26
Yeah, and as soon as we stop learning we’re all in trouble.
Jon Paul Driver 49:29
Ah, but one more point on this, fiber digestibility and time. If you’re testing 240 hour fiber digestibility, does that mean you have to wait 10 days for your samples to come back? Or do we have a different proxy for that 240 hour digestibility that you can do in 12 or 24 hours? And these are some of the competitive elements between labs that were being discussed.
Dr Allan Rattey 49:54
Correct. Yeah, now we’re always using NIR for all these things built on calibrations. And sure, so they’ve got their velvet.
Jon Paul Driver 50:01
But if you do go to the wet cam to really refine those calibrations, yeah.
Dr Allan Rattey 50:05
Exactly, yeah, you need to turn to 240 hours, which is a long time.
Jon Paul Driver 50:10
Absolutely. Again, I’ve been joined by Dr Alan Rattey and he’s Intergrain’s National Oat Breeder. Thank you again for your time. This has been a wonderful conversation.
Dr Allan Rattey 50:21
Thanks Jon and thanks to Feed Central for making this opportunity available. Thanks all.
Jon Paul Driver 50:25
A big thanks to our guests today for sharing valuable insights. This podcast is proudly presented by Feed Central. Stay tuned in for upcoming episodes.
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