Neil Comben, general manager of LongReach Plant Breeders, discusses the critical role of end point royalties (EPRs) in supporting Australian wheat breeding.
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00:00Jess Hi, on AgriCast today, we're talking about
00:09some of the challenges facing plant breeding at the moment. And we'll be hearing from a
00:14valued AgriCast commercial partner, Longreach Plant Breeders. Neil Combin is the General
00:20Manager of Longreach and a member of the Australian Crop Breeders Board. What does Longreach Plant
00:26Breeders actually do? And what are some of your major varieties?
00:29Neil We develop new wheat varieties for Australian farmers. It's as simple as that.
00:34We've got some very popular varieties out there in the marketplace at the moment,
00:38particularly in the east where we've got Lancer, Raider, Hellfire, Flanker. I've got a list of
00:43quite a few in that part of the world. And we've got some really exciting material coming through
00:47our pipelines for the southern region, so South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia.
00:53Jess Now I understand one of the biggest challenges
00:55at the moment is around endpoint royalties. Can you explain what an EPR is?
01:01Neil Sure. So endpoint royalty is a royalty
01:04that comes back to the plant breeder at the sale of the produced crop, basically. So as the grower
01:10sells his grain, part of that money comes back to the breeder. And the reason that that's important
01:15is because if you think about traditional seed sales, that's how plant breeding normally makes
01:20their money is through revenue from seed sales. Given that these crops are open pollinated,
01:26it means that growers can retain their own seed or sell over the fence to their neighbour,
01:31and in which case you don't make money out of seed sales. And that's why the endpoint
01:35royalty system was brought into place so that there is an excellent value capture mechanism
01:40to support open pollinated crop breeding in Australia.
01:43Jess So there is a mechanism in place,
01:46but what's the challenge with that? Are people just not using it?
01:49Neil Well, the challenge is that, you know,
01:51we do have a very good auto deduct system set up so that as the grower sells his grain,
01:56some of the funds from that is retained and sent back to the plant breeder. So that works fine.
02:01But whenever grain is sold outside that system, we don't know about it unless the growers have
02:07completed their harvest declaration information stating exactly how many tonnes they've grown.
02:12Jess Is there any incentive for growers to actually do that?
02:15Neil Well, the incentive is that if we don't have
02:17that value capture mechanism working, we will lose open pollinated crop breeding in Australia.
02:23So, you know, 20 odd years ago, that used to be done by the government. That's all changed now
02:27since the PBR Act came into play. As a result, if this falls over, where does the funding then
02:34come from plant breeding? Jess
02:35What would you like to see to help improve compliance rather than relying on growers
02:41to fill out forms, which let's face it, not many farmers like to fill out forms?
02:46Sure, look, changes to our PBR Act that meant that auto deduct had to happen at each sale.
02:52At the moment, it doesn't. It's a voluntary sign up to that for the grain traders.
02:57That would be a great start. But ultimately, what we need to do is get a simpler process,
03:03like in the short term, we need a simpler process for growers to give us
03:06their information on how many tonnes of each variety they've grown.
03:09Neil Combin, thank you so much for your insights.