 I just want to welcome you all to another weekly science exchange with UWA. We're here to promote the relevance of our UWA research and its teaching activities to you all. My name is Kirsty Brooks. For those of you who have been here before, I've always been in the background and I'm making my on-air premiere today. Thank you to everyone who has been involved already and I look forward to hosting today's session for you. I'm actually a lab manager here within the Faculty of Science at UWA, so I'm usually aiding the learning of our students, but today I've decided to moderate some of our great researchers so we can learn a few things together. So it is almost time to start, but before we do, I'll give you a bit of background about each of our researchers, a small bio and each of them and introduce them all to you for those of you who aren't familiar with them. We've got Associate Professor Fran Hoyle. So Fran's actually had a research career that spanned almost 30 years and she's included, that's actually included time in Perth, Derruth and Northern, in a number of appointments that have gone across national, state and industry committees. She's got growing interest in organic management, soil quality and function, which inspired her to actually do a PhD in soil microbial processes related to carbon turnover, which I daresay will probably hear a bit about today. Fran's came to UWA in late 2015 and she's actually the current Associate Dean for Community Engagement here at InScience. She's the Soils West Director and continues to have research interests in soil carbon and farming systems. Next we've got Dr Nick Taylor. So Nick came back to, did I say came back to Western Australia in 2000, Nick? Were you here before that? Nope. Okay, so he moved here in 2000 to complete his PhD and then he went over to the UK but then he came back to sunny old Perth as he was attracted by the large and advanced agriculture industry and opportunities for him to carry out his research. Nick focuses on identifying changes in the cellular chemistry of plant cells when they're exposed to changes in their environment, with particular focus on maintaining yield during extreme temperature events. He hopes that this knowledge can contribute to the development of more environmentally friendly and adaptable crops to maintain an enhanced future product. And last but definitely not least, we are pleased to invite Dr Don McFarland in with us as well. Don has observed climate and agricultural changes here in WA since the 1950s as well as across Australia. He grew up on a wheat belt farm before studying soil science and hydrology. Don carried out this research in natural resource management areas for the Department of Ag and water and also for Siro. Don's currently in a junct with the UWA School of Agriculture and Environment. Alright, with everybody's introductions done, I guess I'm going to kick off the conversation and I wanted to start with Don as I think that you actually have some insight that none of us have and that's lived experience as well as the research on how you've seen the climate change in WA. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit so we can get this started? Yeah, okay, Kirsty. I have been around for a long time and as I say, I grew up on the wheat belt and certainly my memories of what the climate was like have very, very changed as to what they were, what they are at the moment. And I guess as well as observing them over a long period of time, I've also been able to do a lot of measurements of them so we can actually get recorded estimates of what's happened. And certainly, I mean, when I first started with the Department of Agriculture, we were working on problems of too much water. So there was water erosion, water logging, dry land salinity, there was all sorts of things but it was mainly too much water and so we were looking at ways of preventing a lot of land degradation occurring at the time. And when you think about it now, a lot of those issues are not front of mind to a lot of farmers and you just have to remember back, well I do anyway, remember back to the fact that we know we had a lot of flooding problems and people putting in contour banks, they were going to the Department of Agriculture for things like contour banks which are just anathema at the moment with farming systems. But the whole Southwest used to get very, very wet. We would get days on end of a rain where everything would wet up. The soil profile wet to very great depths. But now, just at the moment, we're getting very light showers and what happens is that it only wets the top of the soil. In between those showers we get a lot of sunlight comes out, the wind blows, everything dries off and the worries we had in the past about things like water logging as I said have just disappeared because the wetting fronts are not going very deep anymore. So we had a lot of issues to do with what to do with the water in the subsoil and how to get the roots down into the subsoil. Well if the water doesn't even penetrate the subsoil in some years then it's very, very difficult to actually get access to the nutrients and the other things that might grow in those subsoils. So I guess what I'm trying to do is paint a bit of a picture of how we've gone from too much water to now we're only wetting the top subsoils and perhaps later on in the discussion we can talk a bit about what the projections are for the next 30 years because one of my roles in the last 15 or so years has been to look at water supplies and we've done a lot of climate projections as to what's happening and likely to happen in the next 15 to 30 years. I guess just in that I'd just like to throw it open with Francis and Nick as well apparently and just say well if we're only wetting the top 15 to 20, 30 centimetres in some years is that all of the profile that the plants can see? So thanks Don I think that's a really great segue in and you're really right I think having seen the rainfall distributions change over the last decade and particularly you know that lower rainfall the ice or higher it's moving toward the west and sort of getting drier and warmer and and perhaps seeing the frequency and distribution of rainfall change. It's been really critical to think about where the plant roots are in the soil and what that soil can hold. So in terms of the soil strategies you know we are looking at you know largely farming in systems where perhaps we've got some constraints within the soil's profile so whether they be a subsoil compaction layer, a soil acidity, low fertility because of low organic matter you know we are really looking to see what we can do and how we can engineer our soils potentially and our biota and our plants to see how they can better capture that water faster more effectively but also get deeper into the profile so that we can we can finish off through the season. I think one of the other interesting things I've heard talking to some growers particularly down south of WA is that not only is the amount of water that's arriving the time of the year that it's coming is changing a lot too and I was talking to a grower just north of Esperance and I was saying that they're getting quite a lot of summer rain which was very much not a part of WA 10 years ago. So they're getting a little bit less rainfall but it's coming at a totally different time and that's having to make them think about how they're going to change their planting profiles and the time in which they want to sow and the time in which they want to harvest and one of the more extreme examples of this is you've got some growers a bit further north that have been planting winter wets in March and then putting the sheep on them later on to get some of the biomass through because they've got that moisture so much earlier than what they used to from the summer rains and then harvesting you know September November time again so as well as just the amount of water when it's coming is also going to dictate you know when we should be planting and what results we get from those plantings and that is really critical in terms of the soil's function as well so if you think about it the longer that a soil is under a plant system or a planted system the more resources it's getting back in terms of you know re-exudates organic matter imports so the more biologically active and functional it can be so you know having those opportunities to extend the length of the growing period or to supplement it with a different type of system would seem advantageous in terms of benefiting the fertility of the soil as a whole. I think perhaps the other thing I should mention that one of the great advantages we've got now compared to when I first started researching is that we've got so much better at predicting what's going to happen in the season I don't know it's still very crude and people would say it's not accurate enough but if you if you know you have the history that I have it was very very difficult to know what sort of season you're going to get and I'm very impressed by having worked with groups in the CSRO and the Bureau of Meteorology as to how quickly we're now able to get a much better idea of what sort of next going to happen in the next five to ten days but also what's likely to happen overseas the you know the really importance of sea surface temperature and comparing this year's with previous years let's take taking a lot of the guesswork out that was there years ago and I just see this is going to continue in in future you know the ability to make last minute decisions in some cases by farmers as to how much crop to put in when to put it in you know whether to add fertilizer all those other decisions which were done by the seat of the pants years ago are now being done with some very very powerful computer models that weren't available previously yeah and I do agree I think though there is that you know that there's still that really strong need to look at the opportunistic timeliness of what we might do in terms of responses to things that perhaps aren't are a bit more unusual or a bit less predicted in terms of you know are there opportunities to put in a cover crop over summer in the right environment opportunistically but also not just that not just the effect on the plant grows but you know if for example we had increasing summer rainfall which we've mentioned and we had increasing temperatures over summer then that also has an effect on the the decomposition rates of the soil organic matter in the soils and when those nutrients are flowing through that system so with higher temperatures and moisture conditions we'd expect soil organic matter to decompose faster so we need something there to be able to you know how do we utilize those nutrients that are produced from that yeah with these opportunistic plantings you know depending on what the season is like are we going away from the more standardized yearly rotations that we've seen that have existed in WA for a very long time that don't vary so much over the last 10 years to something that's going to be much more opportunistic where people are choosing based on what the weather predictions are based on what the soil nutrient state is and based on all those things rather than their traditional cropping rotations and and add in markets I mean we've just had an example this year where people were getting around to putting in you know manufacturing barley and making decisions at the last minute is what's happening to markets as well so and I think the other thing that we've traditionally not done getting back to the some rainfall thing but if you've been to Queensland they look at how much moisture there is in the soil and then they make a cropping decision on how much moisture there is so if we do get some northwest cloud bands bringing some moisture down and we get some subsoil moisture then we can suddenly make decisions about what to do in that year and I've also seen in places like in western New South Wales where they might make make a decision not to crop at all in some years you know they just think that there's no soil moisture there all the projections are that it's not going to get me a wet year and therefore why should we put all that capital into it into a crop or at least put it into a very short you know growing season crop and also to avoid the frost issues and things like that so I must admit being a farm at the moment it's much more complicated than the farm that I grew up in where you know it was very traditional you knew you knew a year in advance what you're going to put into each each paddock and you just paddock you just cropped it fence line to fence line as well yeah and I do agree I mean that's a there's a key difference in terms of thinking about the systems and how they change you know between soil types for example so if we took those Queensland soils which are nice and deep and they have quite a lot of water holding capacity compared them to maybe some of our shallower sands or duplex soils where potentially we've got a lower ability to store that water for a longer period of time then we're facing a different set of challenges so you know what is it about our our plant structure or its brooding function or our soils because we're talking about can they get below you know if there's stored water below can they get to it there's a subsoil acidity layer then they're not going to potentially grow through that so it's I mean it's such a complex system it's really exciting but it just means that there's lots of things to unpick as we move through it and I think that there's lots of opportunities Nick with plant types that potentially have you know that have brooding systems that provide us that capacity to get deeper or to produce different roots your dates that perhaps do something for us what's going on in that space you know there's some there's some really interesting research particularly in the area stress responses and a paper that I know you'll love and I'll send to you later on was one that came out just recently talking about the microbiome and how the microbiome was affecting the salinity tolerance of some weak varieties and so I mean salinity is still a problem in parts of the WA and particularly down south where they have the higher levels of rainfall I know they're still dealing with salinity issues there and they often use cover crops as a way to try and ameliorate that that salinity but at the same time there's some interesting observations that have happened with bummers around the list which are saying that now historically in WA it was you know 100% about the yield they want the highest yielding variety they could possibly get but now that some people are considering a change from that perspective which is they'd rather have stable yield over a number of years that might have a small yield penalty because it's a stable variety a more reliable variety but that would be they'd be happier to deal with that than the boom and bust years that we've traditionally seen so maybe given those plant types that have um are more efficient at utilizing the resources that are available to them yeah or that are more resilient to the you know the the wide changes in temperature that you might see or the wide um more adaptable to a bit of salinity environment but there's a yield penalty to that so the the really good areas of the farm if it's a really good year they're not going to do quite as well as they had the ultimate crop in there but they'll they'll flatten out the curve so to speak over a number of years and if you look at some of the production you know compare Australia to many other countries um the biggest variable that affects um the production of grains in Australia is the climate year on year we have these huge fluctuations it's much more stable in Europe and it's much more stable in America and South America but the climate really has a huge impact on the production levels here now it's interesting because we used to have a very reliable winter rainfall here and you know we you could be pretty sure when you'd be cropping and we know when you'd be able to have past shift for sheep and all sorts of things but and we talked about that seasonal shift and the most obvious one is that the late break it's just been amazing I mean it's been at least it seems like six to eight weeks it's from my memory of what it was like when I was growing up in that wheat belt farm but the the end of the season hasn't changed as much as the start of that season and as I say we can get some of that summer rain it we've looked at the statistics on that it is there but it's not there in every year and it really does depend on you know whether we get I get mentioned in north west cloud band so that's really really important particularly for the eastern wheat belt just whether you get that or not that can decide whether you've got a really good crop or not but can I just ask the question because it was always the thing can we now conserve water in the soil let's say that we we're not going to try and grow a crop and use the small amount of water that's stored in the soil profile what's our ability now to actually be able to carry over water from one season to the next is that improved in that time so I think in terms of the soils research you know there's been a lot of work done that's been done through the department primary industries funded through the university CSRO you know I think we've been doing really well at re-engineering soils and providing access or pathways into deeper soils which allows us some capability of utilizing that at deeper moisture I think we're hamstrung a little bit you know with the fact that we do have very sandy surface top soils and we have low organic matter now I know a lot of people talk about organic matter and its ability to hold water and it does it's tremendous in terms of its capacity to hold water but you have to think about what percentage of the soil is made up of organic matter so most of our soils would be less than two percent organic carbon most of them would be less than one and a half um and for every one percent of that carbon you're probably only holding a difference between two and five millimeters so perhaps in a season which was infrequently wet if you had that two to five millimeters available to you a number of times it would start to add up you know 20 kilograms of grain per millimetre of rain maybe you get half a tonne but I think you know in a year where you're getting more frequent rainfall it's going to make very little difference at all to a water supply it may make a difference in terms of nutrient turnover and things so I think we just have to be a little bit careful in terms of pointing at one thing and saying that's our solution because I don't think it would be a one-step solution I think it is that complexity and this is why I love this panel is because you know we've got climate we've got soils we've got plants and I think that you know we really need that cross-disciplinary focus to see why this plant root is accessing what it does and what it can do with it can I can I put up a bit of a plug for sandy soils I know that they're getting a bit of a beating here but actually if you don't have a lot of rain in some years then the soil requirement for that water is very low in sandy soils if you try and win up a clay soil to any depths you need an enormous amount of water and so what happens is that sandy soils allow water in because it won't run off because they're much more permeable unless they've got water balance of course but they'll allow the water in and if that top centimetre or two dries off which it does sometimes between if you don't get another event it stops soil evaporation so you actually effectively you've got this you might have a moist soil only a few centimetres below the surface but because the top few centimetres are dry it stops capillarity and it won't evaporate so it's actually a very good at conserving water in some ways having sandy soils so I actually I actually am a fan of our sandy soils I think if we had all heavy clay soils you know we'd be very we'd be battling to actually grow um crops in some years and they're much easier to organ ton I can testify to that happen to grow plants in the glass house I'd much rather grow them in some sandy soil than in some clay soil but I guess that does lead us not only to talking about the soil but also what is the options for your plant and their adaptability to climate I think what we've been able to confirm here is the climate is changing but it's variable and we can't being able to anticipate what our climate is going to look like is difficult but being able to identify options for our growers and talking about I think the two things that I've taken out of this is it's not just the soils it's not just plants it's them working together but also the information that we need to know how and when and why we should grow things is also quite important as well so maybe Nick did you want to is what kind of work has been done with the plant adaptability or line breeding that can actually look at these kind of issues our growers are facing yeah there's some really exciting research going on um I guess from me from my perspective I started my PhD in 2000 and that was the same year we sequenced the first plant genome and just in the last couple of years we've actually started a serious effort to start sequencing many of the genomes of our important crops we only got wheat just last year because of its complexity humans have been breeding wheat for such a long time that we've kind of messed with it and made it really complicated but at the same time since 2000 we started learning a lot about the genes that control a number of features in plants and this has been done on our model plant we it's like a lab rack for the plant world but now a lot of that knowledge can be applied to our crop plants because we have the genetic information and so I actually see now the ability and the the possibility of making plants that are much more water efficient or that are more adaptable to varying climates I mean most of us local gardeners would know that some plants are particularly prosecutable and sum up we're starting to get a handle on why that is and we might be able to apply those ideas into our crop plants going forward and same with our heat tolerant plants or our humidity tolerant plants we can apply that knowledge and we've kind of opened up this this all these possibilities through this sequencing of the genome so for me it's kind of the most exciting time possible to be involved in agriculture because of the possibilities that are available and I think we can start to address some of these questions in tandem with our soil friends about how we're going to manage the challenges that we're facing with the changing climate but also the increase in demand we know that by 2050 demand for food is going to increase globally and so we're facing a sort of double challenge we need to increase our productivity at the same time as do it in a more difficult environment and so I think these genetic tools are going to provide us with the things we need to make these plants that will maintain their productivity in the harsh environments and allow us to continue to grow their production for the future feeding of food security yeah and I think what I've noticed in the genetic work that we've been able to do not only across plants but also in soils as well is it can take out some of that unknown a bit of that trial and error that we would usually do we can we can put a bit more concrete evidence around what we know because we're able to map what we're able to map and what wasn't unknown what we can't see we can now see so we can see that either through a numbers game down to a species level and understand the environments that we're dealing with because I think one of the statistics that blows more one of the numbers that blows my mind is one of our professors Andy Wiley here how to start that he's about to shoot it's about the microbes in soil and when you walk across some healthy grass approximately how many microbes are under one foot and it's uh it's 12 trillion which is huge and and I think that a lot of us have taken for granted the living environment that is the soil you know it's not just the plant that's alive we have to remember where the plant gets its food from and we've always been told it's the sun it's the sun but it's not just the sun they need the water they need the nutrients from the soil to be able to fully grow and and that's really interesting Kessie because you know there is in a handful of soil is what a billion micro organisms there what's really interesting though is that even though there are so many I mean there's so many it's hard to get your head to comprehend how many there are but in terms of them persisting in the soil and where they're living they're really a little bit like islands or hot spots of activity so they're probably only colonizing about one percent of the surface area of that soil so you know there's billions and trillions and zillions of them but what I would really like to see is you know how do we work with Nick for example to say can we deliver a plant genotype that is going to provide root exudates that signal to the right organism that it wants to produce nitrogen now or it wants to enable phosphorus to be taken up into the plant so how do we trigger the functions of the soil that we see as beneficial to a cropping system in this instance through providing it different root carbohydrates or amino acids or you know those sorts of things I guess we're only just touching the surface at the moment because we have traditionally bred for what's above ground for 120 years in Australia we've only looked at yield and how the plants look and biomass effectively and so we haven't really focused on root traits and I think root traits are becoming increasingly acknowledged as an important part of the success of those plants and the root micro riser interactions are clearly becoming an important part of our understanding about the activity of those plants I hadn't even considered that a micro riser could have an effect on salinity tolerance until I was totally blown out of water by the paper I mentioned earlier just came out last week and so our understanding of the roots and the root structure and the role they play in the success of our cropping systems is increasing and there's a really global and local research going on that's really exciting in that area. Nick can I ask you to think ahead and if everything is going the way you're saying and you are being able to breed for you know drought tolerance and heat and cold and salinity and all these sorts of things in 10 years time do you see farmers with silos filled with grain that's got these sort of abilities or at least some or another way if you like of modifying the soil so that depending on the season and predictions of what's going to happen to the rainfall during that season how much soil moisture they've got what the markets are they could put they could make a last minute decision as to what to put into the ground and then how to treat that perhaps you know treat the soil or the plant afterwards is that where you see agriculture going or the way you know because you can see the future a little bit better than certainly I can. I'm not sure I think there certainly will be years where you want to make that you want to take that option and make the best of your particular year and I think some farmers like I mean farmers are a diverse group of people some of them will be conservative people and they want steady consistent year and year out and then you'll have the more risk willing to take the risk farmer who might say well look this year it's looking like I can really make massive gains by using this variety let's put it in and take that punt on that variety and when we think about mitigation strategies that might be you know you could choose one mitigation strategy which is the conservative route or you could take the the risky strategy but also farmers are buying land in different areas so that they're managing their risk in that way they know that this area if that has a bad year my other area might have a good year my other area might be good as well so I can see the way in which we produce both commodities being very different and people choosing specific plant types or plant varieties to suit their particular climate or their farm status at any one moment at a time but I can also see the conservative approach remaining on larger farms and in certain circumstances so I think we'll see probably combinations of both so perhaps one other thing that I've actually was I've been a little bit disappointed it hasn't been taken up as much as it could have been but you know back in 1987 so that's what you know 33 years ago we started using satellite imagery to map areas of water logging this was for the precursor of the Grain's Research and Development Corporation or GODC they said how big is water logging and we went in there we were able to map with people from CSRO where all of the high yielding and low yielding areas were in within paddocks now I and then obviously we then went on and mapped where salinity was and a lot of other things but I would have thought that within five or ten years of that being used it would become quite routine for farmers to actually monitor exactly where their yields were coming from but I still am surprised in some cases where farmers are still cropping parts of paddocks which will always lose money their gross margins will never be positive you know in other areas where they're getting 80 or 90 percent of their production from I know some farmers have adopted some of this new technology it's not so much new anymore it's 33 years old but we can map now with pretty high precision as to where where the farm profits are coming from but I haven't actually seen a major take up of that technology and people just saying look I'll only put in this quarter of this this paddock or I'll fence this paddock out and and not even try to put any fertiliser or grain or anything into that other part because I always lose money on it is that there's some of these technologies that just don't seem to take root is that what you've discovered elsewhere I think there's some barriers to adopting the technology and I think that like we're aware now of what some of those barriers are and there's active work by organisations such as I know the Australian plant phenomics facility for example is trying to work and provide a data pipeline so to speak that makes it easy to interpret and assess that data it's coming from the satellites because it's kind of inaccessible and what we kind of really want is a decision kind of like a decision matrix right so you add in a piece of data and one of those pieces of data would be the satellite information about the state of the particular farmer's paddock and then your other decision matrix might be what type of grainy want to grow depending on what's happening in our markets because we can see they can change very quickly or how much they're prepared to invest that year in their fertilisers or those other things so I think that the access there's been some roadblocks to people being able to access that information and satellite information was much more expensive in 87 than it was than it is now with all the various entrepreneurs putting up their satellite clusters into space but at the same time I've been waiting for a hoverboard and I still haven't got that so some of these technologies are there they show a lot of promise early on but the deploying them of them is complex and I think there is work being done nationally and trying to make that data more accessible there's a lot of people that that see there's a lot of data out there and we've got to get it together to make the best farming decisions so that we can have the most productive outcomes and I think you're spot on there I think in some ways there needs to be a middleman to take this information and put it into a format where people can properly interpret it to expect farmers to go and do that it's just just unbelievable you know not feasible but the other bit of technology that came out in 1987 which we were using when we're doing the board logging mapping was global positioning systems now GPS is now just everyone uses GPS all the time but the satellite monitoring and mapping that we were doing you know 33 years ago is is there in some places and but there's still no middle person if you like providing that service and I'm just surprised that in some ways that it's not as developed as GPS is in terms of decision making because as you say all that data now is much higher precision and it's actually free and it's all calibrated and it's available in some ways there's almost too much information and I know graincast is being used by CSIRO and others so that may be one way where we can we can use that data a bit more easily. I think there's also lots of huge potential there you know there's lots of more digital agriculture type learning and content now based in the undergrad degrees so I think in terms of going forward I think it's been really difficult to find the platforms that match together in terms of integrating the information and being able to pull a decision out of it there've been little isolated bunches of data I think there's more and more consultants in this space and I think it is a true future area for agriculture going forward is in you know designing the platforms and the systems and you know working with the scientists to make sure they have the evidence base around how those decisions then come out of those platforms. Yeah and there's a lot of work being done here at UWA in that and I think it's purely that it's finding the right ways to communicate it to the public for them to also be able to use it and make it worthwhile so we're actually launching a new degree in ag technology looking at precision ag and how that can benefit so we should have a nice new generation of precision ag students coming through in the next few years that have been now that I think that we feel that we've got the capabilities and that our own knowledge is a lot more concrete especially with the advancements of drones and we can even throw back to one of the previous science exchanges Nick Callow and how much how quickly he spoke about that changing in that field and how much that's now become accessible that a lot of people want to use it so now we just have to figure out how can we use it and how best do we communicate it to the public and our growers to be able to utilize that. I think that point you made Kirsty about data supported decisions is really important and the value of making sure that we're making decisions based on the data. I mean I can put up a drone and take a photograph of something and then infer something from it but I needed a basis for making those decisions and those calls and we need to ensure that the data that's been in the decisions that farmers have been making are from well trusted repositories of information and based on scientific evidence. Yeah and I think that's coming back to us as scientists knowing that you know we can rely on our memory but sometimes our memory can play tricks on us how quickly and how slowly things happen but if we have that as concrete evidence and we can go back to that that definitely helps us with those decisions and I can speak from experience knowing how patchy climate data can actually be going back multiple decades and that we want to be making these decisions informed and we don't want to be we want to be learning from anything that we've done in the past and not repeating anything. I mean a really good example in the current system is probably the control traffic systems you know where you're starting to employ the data layers the precision technology that's available to you and it has benefit in terms of soils because you're only trafficking a small area of a larger paddock which obviously has benefits for root growth water storage you know those sorts of things so I think they are getting there it's just sometimes stitching the story together takes a little bit of time. Yeah I guess let's jump into some questions because I'm aware of time and we're probably running out of it and we might not be able to get to too many guys apologies we got a bit carried away um let's uh let's start with Ian because his question's been somewhere for a while and we've probably answered it to some degree but in the scenario where growing season rain over the southwest continues to decline how long can we continue our rain rain fed annual crops do we think that those are used by date will we run out of adaptations? I guess the first question is is that decline in rainfall going to continue um because we don't know what's around the corner the predictions are that it will continue to decline um and um I guess there is a I mean there's a limit on how much water um there's a minimum limit of how much water required to grow plant for our current varieties so we start to think about water use efficiency um can we grow plants that have a low water requirement yes we can look at many examples of different types of plants that grow around the world in environments that have a lot less water do we understand entirely how they do it not yet but with some of the tools we've got we might start to understand that we might be able to apply some of those techniques that those plants have developed over their evolutionary time to deal with the low amounts of water in the environments that they live in so um I think there's a possibility that yeah we would be able to there is a limit um and I'll flick over to Francis because I think she's going to talk about this is a panel discussion um so you know again going back to what we've seen what we know so you know we know that in a large majority of our growing areas we haven't actually reached our water limited fuel potentials yet so there's still a lot of rain effective rainfall that we're not currently using so you know if you think about the last decade I think we've had about a 10 decline in the amount of annual rainfall that's fallen but we've not actually lost any of our production because it's been with sufficient frequency at a time where we're still able to maintain those yields so there's a little bit of squeeze value I guess in there in terms of where we're decreasing rainfall if it's at the wrong time of the year then yes there's an impact there but can we be more effective in getting our water into the soil so getting over our water repellency issues ensuring there's good infiltration there's better storage capacity and then have the matching plant type that sucks it up more efficiently cohesive science can I just make like a comment on the you know the future projections I mean because we've involved when I was particularly when I was with CSRO we did a lot of work on looking at future projections but we'll also be able to go back and look at what the old future climate models were saying too and I do have to say that unfortunately of the 16 climate models we looked at when we're looking at the yield of all of the rivers and aquifers in the southwest WA all of them were saying it's going to get hotter and drier and I think hotter is no one's arguing it's going to get cooler or very few people are it's just a matter of whether it's going to get wet over every just about every model there was there was one model that said it would just stay the same but I mean every other model was saying it's going to get drier now it's been another it's been 10 years since we've looked at that data and it's actually been tracking not on the median of what projections were it's actually tracking between the median and the dry so that if of anything the models have been under predicting how fast our climate is changing so those people are hoping that this is just a short term blip and it's going to be a cycle and we're going to go back to wetter and everything will be fine I won't need to change my farming systems that's not what the the climate is saying and I'll just have to say if you go back to early even earlier the Bureau of Meteorology needs and projections in the 2006 or 2008 I think and that they're actually been pretty well spot on as to how dry and how much hotter it's going to get so it's got so so yeah I think we need to plan for an even more variable and hotter and it's possibly drier climate so I'm glad to hear that there's still some unutilized moisture out there we don't need to give up just yet Fran all right I think I can lump a few um questions together into one nice little term regenerative regenerative agriculture I can't even say it regenerative agriculture thank you very much um so I guess that falls under so Sam asked the question is there possibility for emergence of carbon sequestration to improve our soil through organic matter and that water content held which also leads into Chelsea's question about carbon cropping to tackle climate change as being a popular just popular action that we're doing or is there actual concrete evidence that this is going to help us so soils are considered obviously one of the largest pools to sequester carbon um it's larger than the terrestrial carbon pools so carbon in terms of building it up and storing it in a permanent way it's really challenging so for two reasons more than two reasons actually but soil carbon is essentially driven by two things so climate again and soil type are two of the dominant factors so soil type is influential because in our sandy soils um there's very little to physically or chemically complex that organic matter so that it's protected from decomposition so decomposes really really fast um so it's a matter in those systems of maintaining enough inputs every year or regularly to ensure that it's either maintained or built up and that is really challenging so if I thought about changes in soil organic carbon associated with a change in farm management practice such as adopting no tillage um and stubble retention you know I could say we have studies that have shown after 28 years with no burning that our carbon contents are very similar to the to the trial plots where we have burnt stubbles and that is not necessarily reflective of its function so the ones where we've retained stubble are more biologically functioning so they supply more nitrogen but they haven't stored more carbon because of the limitations of the plant inputs we also know that rainfall and temperature influence carbon storage so I've said earlier increasing temperature and increasing amounts of available moisture will enhance the rate of decomposition sort of be going faster it's not necessarily a bad thing if you're in a cropping system because as it's turning over it's obviously supplying nutrients as it goes what it doesn't do is enable you to stabilize carbon in soils very rapidly so we did a study where we looked at measurements across 1500 sites across WA we looked at the driving factors including climate soil type management practices by growers fertilizers you name it we looked at it and it pretty much said sort of north of Perth um and sort of 50 kilometers in from the coast there's a very limited potential to store new carbon in those environments particularly the dry environments because a you're not getting enough rainfall to produce plant biomass which is then going to recover that organic matter in your system but you're also getting hot summer moisture events so it's breaking down really quickly so lots of the potential for WA is seen to be in that south southwest corner lots of the perennial systems have lots of advantages in terms of carbon storage what we know very little about is the permanence of that carbon and in a carbon trading system that is key so most of the carbon that we change in soils will be the labial so they're very quickly turning over carbon it won't be the carbon that maintains in the soil for decades so yes we can change carbon but it's a decadal process it's not something that's going to happen really quickly and so yes you can enter into it with a caveat that it's going to be a frequent flypoint perhaps versus a decision why you'd put in place the system but it wouldn't be the reason why i chose to engage a system you know you might be looking for a more resilient system to cope that would still give you a yield for example rather than just looking at carbon trading as the sole output of those systems all right well i think we all knew that we were going to open Pandora's box a little with um this conversation but it's been fantastic and i apologize to those that we haven't booked um around to your questions but i will be passing them on to our speakers to be able to answer but before we sign off i did want to um ask each of our speakers to today to um maybe leave us with any of our take home messages from today's larger conversation if you have anything that you wanted to maybe leave as a pondering thought or any anything to surmise what we've actually been able to achieve today let's start with unique i guess um you know it's a challenging environment um a challenging environment to grow crops but agriculture has faced many challenges in the past and particularly for the people that are a bit younger um go and look up something called the green revolution that was a period of time in the 1950s and 60s where we faced some really big challenges in agriculture and through great funding and of research and great work by many scientists around the globe um the challenges at that time were overcome and i think we're hopefully at the beginning of something that might be looked back in the future as the second green revolution um so it's exciting time to be in agriculture um and i hope to see lots of really keen students turning up my daughter in the next few weeks thanks nick what about yourself don well i think the words that's really stuck with me you know cursed your opportunistic and flexibility um those are the things that i think you know we you might have a long-term strategy but i think the short-term tactics are going to be very very important and to have the flexibility to to to make the most i think the other thing is that i'm really excited by the the sort of tools that are available you know not keep coming back to satellites and things like that but if we could map um soil moisture you know biomass um all those sorts of things and and where the yields are coming from using satellites and other things but also the predictive of power of the computing power at the moment of what's going to happen with what's going to happen you know with our ability to predict seasons i think is the other exciting thing so i don't know whether we'll ever be able to accept you know predict markets with the same precision hopefully but the biophysical world i think we've got the ability with computers and that to actually take a lot of the guesswork out i think it'd be very exciting to be a farmer if you're into that sort of thing um perhaps working with your consultants in that area it could be very very exciting time to be a farmer yeah and i think it's not just being the farmer but being all those those people that satellite around anybody that's a grower to help them achieve these and really look at not only the macro climate but the micro climate is the most important for any farmer which are you in this room is what's happening on my front door isn't what's happening down on the front door down the road so um understanding that is definitely something that i see happening um around campus and we go when we go out into the field and do trial sites and stuff like that is trying to um facilitate that kind of action as well and Fran i'll um i'll let you leave out last again thanks kristy so so i think i'd go away with thinking about you know regenerating our agricultural systems and our soils i think we've been doing this stepwise for a long long time you know if you think about all of the strategies we've implemented that have been a change in agronomy or soils management so liming paddocks no till um appropriate varieties for the appropriate land type so i think our growers have shown lots of stewardship over our agricultural systems and i think that they continue to be the leader and the forefront of our changing farming systems and you know we need to work with them more and we need to work with each other in terms of making sure that we get these integrated systems and it is exciting because i think agriculture is a really strong career choice still going forward i see a bright future for agriculture and you know i've been here for 30 years and i hope to be here for a few more we hope everyone in this room are going to be working together because um i know and our audience probably isn't aware but none of you guys have really worked together before so i hope this is an introduction to some great things and also to the people in the room um we thank everybody that was involved in today not only our speakers but also you guys on the other side of this virtual wall thanks everybody thank you guys thank you have a great night stay safe we'll see you next time bye okay bye