 Thank you very much, Ian, and what better place to start a session on sustainable resource management makes business sense than with the foundation of agriculture, which is the soil resource. Today I really want to address three general questions. First of all, are current farming systems in Australia sustainable from a soil's perspective? Can we significantly improve profitability through better soil management? And finally, how do we achieve that? And can we see benefits coming from research, development, and extension, and roughly where's the greatest benefit from? In dealing with soil resources, it's really important to take a much longer time perspective than we do in a lot of our other analyses around the economy and everyday life. You really need to have a decadal through to a century view of how soil changes. And many in our community now are not particularly aware of the early history of soil and land management in Australia and what has actually happened through the last, especially the last 50 years. If we go back to the beginnings of European land use in Australia, the initial impact was severe and in some places locally it was catastrophic and we saw landscapes literally fall apart. By the time we got to the end of the 30s and into the 40s with the severe period of dryness and rabbits and so forth, it was a real low point for land degradation in Australia and it was the beginning of a large governmental and institutional response and some of you may know Sir Henry Balti or Henry Balti as he was then the Premier of Victoria who really summarised it fairly well when he said, we could not have made a bigger mess of the soil of the country if its destruction had been carried out under supervision. And that really marked the beginning of soil conservation. So from the 1950s through to the mid-70s was the classic period of soil conservation in Australia and the bottom left image there gives you a sense of it was about erosion banks, it was about trying to get the big problems under control. And Ian just made the point that again is little realised that image is red dawn which occurred in 2013 and there was a view that we had a really major view and a major problem in the agricultural landscapes of Australia. Well the frequency of those events is now about one tenth of what it used to be at the end of the 1940s. So we've had very large improvements and especially in the last 25 years both because of land care and natural resource management but also because of the economic logic of moving to minimum tillage, moving to controlled traffic, innovative forms of grazing. We've had a fairly significant improvement in our management of the landscape. However all the recent assessments of soil and land resources in Australia for the last decade or so are consistent and they come to the conclusion that the outlook for Australia is mixed. We have ongoing risks and threats to soil function that are still present within the landscape. And I'll come to the example of soil acidification in a moment but erosion in some parts of Australia not everywhere in the high intensity rainfall regions of the country in some cases we still have erosion rates that are running at about several hundred to a thousand times the rate of soil formation, clearly unsustainable. In terms of nutrient balance it has improved significantly but as a generalisation we tend to have deficiency in the north and increasing issues with excess nutrients in the south. A much bigger problem in Europe and North America but something that will become a bigger issue for us. Compaction is very widespread in our agricultural soils, often poorly diagnosed but a really significant issue and while we're seeing a lot of really good work at moving to building up carbon stocks, maintaining those carbon stocks is a real challenge. So in broad terms these major problems are half solved problems and they are now not immediately obvious in the landscape so it makes it a much more difficult thing to connect to and in this beautiful area of the Upper Murray you effectively have each one of those threats to soil function in that landscape. If we go to the example of soil acidification and I'll just look at western Australia because Chris Gasey and his colleagues have done a superb job in understanding the scale of the problem and also doing a lot of work on extension and working with industry and farmers with the response. As of 2012 we still had on the left image we still had very large areas where pH was below the critical value of five. Now for those who are not familiar with soil acidification it's a problem that is marked by a threshold. You do not want to go past that threshold. Once you do the cost of repair dwarfs the cost of prevention. We have seen a terrific response in the last 10 years with really big increases in lime application in WA farming systems but even with that great increase on the right in 2014-2015 we are still only at 65% of what is needed to arrest the problem. Now in the west we know what's going on. There are other parts of Australia where we do not have this level of evidence nor understanding but we know acidification is occurring. That's on the managing the risks. There is a whole set of opportunities where we can improve profitability wherever we have significant yield gaps. Now this was mentioned in the climate variability and change session earlier. On the left is an analysis of the last 10 years of wheat yields for Australia done by the SV Hockman and colleagues. What it shows is that we have large areas still with significant yield gaps. Often 40-50% of potential yield given the rainfall and the season. That says opportunity. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that soil constraints are a significant part of that yield gap. On the right we have an example just published by Yash Deng and Phil Moody for a property typical grain enterprise near Gundawindi. 10 years of analysis, average yield gap of 1.5 tonnes per hectare over that period. About $50,000 a year of loss production attributable to soil constraints. The big issue is can we remove those constraints? It's a research and an extension problem. One of the things about soils is that they're everybody's second or third priority and in Australia we don't have a Bureau of Soils or we don't have a mandated agency taking responsibility. So it's been realised in the last few years that more attention has to be given to it so we saw last year the Chief Scientist Ian Chubb included soil and water as one of the nine national research priorities. As Ian mentioned we now have the cross-sectoral strategy across the research and development corporations, state agencies and universities trying to get a much better and coordinated approach to soils in Australia. Through this process five priorities fraction have been identified and I'm just going to skip through them fairly quickly. The first priority is that we have to find solutions to soil based constraints and really importantly they have to be tailored to individual soil types. There's a range of difficult old Australian soils. It's amazing that we farm these and we do a great job on it but Australian soils have a whole set of unusual constraints that are difficult to overcome. Just looking at the near surface layers of a soil doesn't give you any clue about how to fix them or to remove the constraints. So there's a very big challenge in developing rapid diagnostic systems for quickly identifying which constraints are at play in any given season or farm or situation. And there's the challenge of finding interventions and I would suggest radical interventions whether they be with tillage, organic amendments, the use of particular crops and cultivars to overcome and re-engineer the soil profile. It's a bit like gardening. Closely related to finding solutions to soil based constraints is the need to improve water and nutrient use efficiency. Now the great achievement of our agronomists in the last 20 years is the big advances on improving water use efficiency. So it really starts with water use efficiency. Biomass production and yield are all determined or regulated by the amount of water you transpire through the plant. So when you work back from that you've got to be able to capture rainfall efficiently, get it to the roots at the right time at the right place and then have it transpire. So managing soil structure is almost your first point of call in managing the hydraulics or the hydrology of the profile. The second significant challenge which I've already alluded to is that we have to improve nutrient use efficiency in all our managed systems, especially nitrogen and phosphorus. I've mentioned the challenge of rebuilding stocks of organic carbon. It obviously has benefits from a climate mitigation front. It has great benefits for soil health and improving the ease of management of the soil in the longer term. Closely related is finding ways of doing all of this while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. All these things are interlinked. But it's a clear priority that everyone across multiple industries has identified. Now in Australia, I'll go back a step. Some of you would have heard Mikio's talk yesterday and particularly looking at the US examples, SST and a few of the companies that have and Climate Corp, the amazing access to information that is now driving how agriculture is done. In Australia we don't have an equivalent to the detailed soil surveys of the US. But we do have fantastic R&D and technology developments so that in the broader research community and amongst the agencies, we've been world leaders in developing new methods of mapping soils, the functional properties of soils, of making information available online so it feeds through to models like APSIM or through to yield profit. And in a sense all the design and a lot of the backbone for the information infrastructure we need, a lot of that work has been done. But we have an enormous issue around how we collect information in an efficient way and in a coordinated way so that this system can work. But basically we've got the technology in place. There's an institutional and economic challenge about how we make it work. The fourth priority, which again, it seems obvious, but there's a lot of subtlety to it. And it's really to support innovation and soil management. Now, every week across Australia people are experimenting on farms doing things that no one's done before. This is a wonderful example just done a month or two ago after the fires in South Australia by Brian and Troy Fisher. It was a response to the area just north of Adelaide. It was burnt. It was a rapid response to get basically bare ground in a better state to deal with wind erosion, potential wind erosion. It was an old idea. They quickly implemented it. And it's innovative. Now, these things happen all the time. And the challenge we have in on the R&D side is to verify and test these innovations, understand them so we know why they work, and then give a rational framework for where we extrapolate it to. Where else do we think it will work? It's very important to understand that soil management is highly determined by the soil type. So what works on one soil doesn't work on another. But it's even more critically determined by the soil type and the climate interaction. Those of you who were sitting in on the talk before lunch on climate change when Mark Halden was talking about the interactions with phenology and climate change and phenology, there are similar interactions with soils. So by way of example, two soils. One on the left is from Lama Roo, the one on the right is on the Darling Downs. They are both very productive soils in their respective environments. If you flip them around and you took the soil from Lama Roo and put it on the Darling Downs and the other way, you probably wouldn't make a buck. You'd have crop failure. The complexity of the interactions between soils and climate means that under the shifting climate that we're seeing now, particularly with the move southwards of the subtropical systems, it doesn't mean we just move the agriculture farming systems because we may not have suitable soils in those environments that can be managed accordingly. So there are surprises in how we do this. Okay, the fifth priority is around developing more effective soil and land use policy. I've alluded to one already. We have a really big market failure problem on information. How do we pay for it? How do we curate it and how do we distribute it? There's a big economic analysis job and an institutional reform job there. Many of you are very familiar with the challenges around good quality agricultural land with the clashes over energy production or coal versus prime agricultural land. But in the coming decades, the urban expansion we will see on Eastern Australia, in Eastern Australia especially, will be a really challenging thing to manage. Just look at the Sydney Basin and vegetable production if you want an example today. We also have a challenge around getting complementary policies on climate, agriculture and environment. So mitigation and carbon sequestration policies or biofuels or whatever need to be complementary with agriculture and there's a big soil component in there. So, look, I've painted a quick picture there of some of the issues and priorities for soil achieving sustainable soil management in Australia. It's nationally important but I'd put it to you that it's globally critical. Now, those of you who were asleep last year may have missed that it was the international year of soils, the first ever UN international year of soils. And in December, to mark the end of that year, was the publication of the first ever status of the World Soils Report based on peer-reviewed literature. And it doesn't make for happy reading. Australia is actually one of the spots of optimism globally because of how we're managing our landscapes. The basic message from that report is that the majority of the World Soil Resources are in only a fair, poor or very poor condition and that the current outlook is for that situation to worsen unless there are large-scale interventions. Think of Australia in the 1930s and 40s and you may have a bit of a feel for it when you go to the Middle East, to West Africa, Southern Africa, large parts of Asia. And I guess an even bigger perspective, this is a piece of work done by Brian Keating and his colleagues really looking at options for meeting global food demand out to 2050. And some of you may have seen these food wedges. They essentially identified three broad categories. At the top, reducing demand, so that's reduce over consumption and so forth. The blue box is all the things to increase production and the red box is don't lose any productive capacity you've got now. Without going through those in detail, one of the striking things is that half of those broad categories of intervention involve improving soil management or achieving sustainable soil management and they are also the options that are the most feasible and attractive. Many of the others are in fact far more difficult to pull off. So this is a much bigger issue than just in Australia. It's a very big issue internationally. So look, in summary, soil management in Australia has improved a lot and it's improved a lot right before our eyes in the last 25 years. That's a great achievement that we should shout from the hilltops. There's good evidence that we can improve profitability even better by improving soil management and particularly some new forms of intervention. And so expect significant benefits from investments into patient investment into soil RD&E. And I say patient investment because a lot of this work is incremental. A lot of this work involves a lot of hard yards with participative engagement with groups. It will take a long time, but it will yield the benefit. In closing, I think it's, I guess, to come back to the slightly celebratory aspects without being smug. I think in Australia we've got something to be very proud of. We've been able to pull an old vulnerable landscape back from the brink of widespread land degradation. We've had very successful agriculture across large areas. It's a remarkable achievement given how poor many of our soils are and how difficult and challenging our climate is. And so the opportunity we have in the next decade is that if we can achieve sustainable soil management, that would be a great achievement that would not only be of great value to Australia but it would also create a beacon of hope for many, many other countries that are absolutely struggling in knowing how to manage similarly difficult soils and difficult environments. So Ian, thank you very much.