EVENT: From dust bowls to food bowls: Australia's conservation farming revolution

The challenges of global food security and climate change have re-focussed public and political attention on agriculture in Australia.

Images of dusty ploughed fields and dying sheep and trees have generated a public perception of an inappropriate “European” agriculture in Australia that belies the innovative, efficient and productive farming systems that have developed during the last 30 years.

In this talk, Adj/Prof John Kirkegaard will discuss how Australia’s innovative farmers now grow a diversity of crops and pastures without tillage, underpinned by fundamental and adaptive agricultural research.

They retain stubble to protect the soil, and use satellite-guided precision seeding, spraying and harvesting to provide highly efficient production with reduced environmental risk. Innovation is continuing apace, with rapid soil and plant sensing to guide management, better forecasting of weather and crop yields, and novel physiology and genetics to provide better crop varieties to meet the challenges, in the coming decades, of substantially increasing food production in environmentally benign ways.

Register online at ioa.uwa.edu.au/events/register