Farming for a hungry world - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 27: Food Chain
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Anna Salleh
THE PROBLEM IS, public funding for agricultural research in Australia has been declining as a percentage of GDP. Under the squeeze of budgets, on-farm research has been getting the short straw at our national scientific research agency. Head of agribusiness at CSIRO, Dr Joanne Daly, says CSIRO is changing the type of work it does as part of a refocussing on the big challenges of water, climate and competing land uses. ‘We will do less on-farm work and more laboratory work,' says Daly. She points out that productivity in Australian agriculture has reached a plateau and CSIRO wants to move away from ‘incremental' advances to those that will have an ‘abrupt' impact. Daly cites, as an example, GM cotton, which has been engineered to exude its own pesticide. Cotton farmers have used this technology to slash synthetic pesticide use, although they must pay licence fees and royalties to Monsanto and the CSIRO's Division of Plant Industry for using the GM seed.
Michael Borgas, of the CSIRO staff association says much on-farm research is being replaced by computer modelling. But he says CSIRO staff are concerned that the models will be of little use without the backing of adequate on-farm research: ‘They're worried the lack of engagement with farmers is going to cut off access to information that isn't in the models at the outset.' Australia's dry-land cropping saw a 50 per cent increase in productivity in the 1990s and Borgas says this is only because scientists and farmers worked together to discover that crop rotation leads to healthier soils with less diseases.
An increasing proportion of public funding for agricultural research is coming from what are known as the rural research and development corporations (RDCs). Through these, farmer levies of over $200 million a year are matched by government funding. This adds up to around four times the amount of CSIRO appropriation funding spent on plant and animal research (according to 2006/7 figures provided in 2008 in response to Senate questions). Some RDCs have carried out trials on different farming systems but critics say the RDCs are overly focused on solving short-term problems in their industry. For example, Adams says the livestock industry tends to fund research on cows rather than pastures. ‘There is no funding for any of the long-term grassland or pasture research sites in Australia,' he says. ‘It falls between the cracks.' To add insult to injury, the 2009 Federal Budget announced the closure of Land and Water Australia, the only RDC designed to integrate public good and ecological principles into farming research. Some say it is up to CSIRO to provide leadership on long-term strategic research of this kind that will have spin-offs for agriculture as a whole.
When it comes to specific research into organic farming systems, most recent estimates are that Australia spends around just $450,000 a year. This falls well short of the total organic farmer component of RDC funding. By contrast, Germany and Switzerland spend nearly $20 million a year and even New Zealand spends nearly $9.5 million a year on organics research. While CSIRO spends around $18.2 million on research related to GM crops, it has no specific organic or biological farming program. Indeed in 2007 there was a controversy over CSIRO's retrenchment of scientist Dr Maarten Stapper, who wanted to carry out research in this area. CSIRO's Joanne Daly says the organisation is interested in lowering agricultural inputs and its research on this is useful to all farmers, including organic farmers. Yet Stapper says CSIRO is missing out because of its lack of support for farm-scale studies of ecological farming systems, of the kind routinely carried out elsewhere in the world. CSIRO also failed to support a 2004 proposal for an Organic Co-operative Research Centre. CSIRO says it didn't have the resources and the proposal did not align with its research strategy.
ANOTHER BARRIER FACING ecological farming in Australia is its association with traditional organic farming, which has long been regarded with suspicion by mainstream scientific researchers. Achim Steiner thinks there's an unhelpful cultural bias that categorises organic agriculture as an ‘alternative lifestyle'. But organics has been moving into the mainstream for some time and there are now entire conferences dedicated to the science of organic farming. Global organic markets are now worth billions and 20,000-hectare farms in Eastern Europe are being converted to organics. Certainly many of the conventional farmers turning to ecology don't fit the alternative lifestyle profile.
Scepticism about organic farming is an important part of a scientific approach, but Steiner is concerned that some views towards it are unhealthy. ‘Scepticism can also sometimes be a prejudice or a lack of having tried other ways,' he says. This view is supported by one study of Australian agricultural professionals, which found that historically there has been a bias against organic agriculture. The study, by agricultural economist Dr Sarah Wheeler, from the Centre for Regulation and Market Analysis and the University of South Australia, found while attitudes were improving, many professionals were negative towards organics. The study found these negative views were not based on knowledge, and the more informed professionals were about organic farming, the more positive they were about it. The study found some evidence CSIRO scientists were more likely than others to be negative about organic agriculture.
The little research that has been done on organic and other ecological farming systems suggests future scientific investigations need to be more sophisticated. For example, the New Zealand ARGOS trial has found while organic farming can be profitable and more environmentally-friendly than conventional farming, some conventional farmers manage their farm in a way that is better for the environment than some organic farmers. For example, they do a better job at protecting waterways from stock and don't over-cultivate the soil. The lesson here is that scientific research into farming systems needs to rely less on the labels used by farmers, and more on rigorously specifying the practices they are using.
Farmer Tim O'Halloran says he hasn't got time to get his head around scientific details, but through trial and error he is trying to work out how to survive this harsh brown land. In the last couple of years he has only been breaking even, but O'Halloran still thinks his methods are saving him from a worse fate. All the same, he sits on his veranda and nervously watches the horizon. Will the weather be kind? Has he got it right? Adams praises the farmers of Australia for their innovative spirit: ‘They've coped with some of the most inhospitable climates and soils imaginable.' But he says it's crunch time to give farmers the backing of science in the search for more ecological farming. ‘Sustainability needs a twenty-year vision,' says Adams. ‘It's really about putting in place the infrastructure that will be needed for the next generation.' ♦