 How would you define food security? Well, yeah, that's a tough one. I get this question a lot and most people think food security is all about farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and famine and they're obviously really important aspects to securing enough food for people who are in need and on low incomes, but food security really is a broader issue. It's all about supply and demand and ensuring that globally we have enough food to supply to consumers and so that's as much a responsibility of the first world as it is in the third world. So do you think that if there are issues in terms of food prices overseas because of lack of supply that there is something tangible there for the public in Australia to be concerned about? Yeah, absolutely. I mean back in 2008, which is the last time we had a major food crisis, one of my colleagues in the UK said that she went to Tesco's looking for rice and there was no rice on the shelf. So that brought home to her that this teeter-totter between supply and demand can result in a situation where even in the first world we find ourselves short of products. Of course for us in Australia it's unlikely that we'd be in a situation of famine, but it's really up to the countries that have the technology smarts to ensure that we can stabilise the food supply and avoid the supply and demand situations becoming a shortage of food and a massive price spike. We've got a job to play there. So the thing that I've heard, you know, when I've been to various meetings is that Australia in itself can't feed the world because certainly our capacity to grow food is limited, you know, to maybe tens or maybe, you know between 100 and 200 billion people, but not the scale that is required. What role do you think that maybe Australia can play in terms of dealing with food security globally given the fact that we can't necessarily export enough food to feed large numbers of people? Yeah, that's a good question. Australia is one of the large global wheat exporter. But of course in compared to some of the other large exporters, you know, like Canada and Europe where small players, but what we do have that other countries don't have is the smarts, the technologies to cope with growing crops, particularly cereal crops, in quite difficult environments. I was at a Crawford conference a couple of years ago and one of the delegates from Africa said, oh, we look to you guys in Australia for this technology and the ability to optimise dry land crop production because you guys grow your crops in some of the most adverse environments you like to find in the first world. So I think we've got a role in exporting technology and smarts as well as exporting wheat. So in terms of smarts, you played a, you know, a key role in terms of setting up the Australian plan foromics facility here in Canberra. There's a note at CSIRO, there's a note at ANU. What role do you think that sort of facility where you're developing new technologies for screening traits in the plant's could play in the food security space? Yes. Well, when we set up the plant foromics facility, coincidentally, it was around the time of those major issues in food supply. And I started to put together a bit of a dossier as to where we needed to be in the next 20 years to be able to avoid a major problem, such as we had in 2008. And we did a bit of a survey of researchers in Australia and across the globe as to what was missing in our ability to build a more resilient agriculture and to boost crops by the amount of yield that we needed to feed a burgeoning global population. And there was a general consensus that we needed a quantum improvement in our crop breeding. And the only way we could do that was to circle wagons of a number of different interdisciplinary efforts and bring things like machine vision, machine learning, robotics, hot points computing into agriculture. Because agriculture for many years has been quite a conservative sector of the economy and maybe hasn't adopted digital technologies at the rate at which it could. So we're hopeful that in trying to bring that multidisciplinary focus to agriculture, we could help increase the rate of progress of yield, particularly under difficult conditions. You're highlighting the importance of bringing together biologists, environmental scientists, computer scientists, engineers together in terms of creating solutions for future agricultural challenges and so on. I noticed that the Ernst & Young report came out two weeks ago, I think was giving advice to the minister and the full sector about what was needed was that there was needed to be an ecosystem where there would have computer scientists, engineers working with biologists and so on to come up with the solutions for the problems that are ahead. And in that respect, the ANU has, I think, an enormous advantage because of the fact that it has close proximity of all of those sections of engineering, computer science, biology and so on in a very small precinct right across the road from CSIRO. So that seems to be exactly the type of area that can be developed over the next few years of getting those folk to focus their skill sets on the problems of agriculture. You mentioned the business of quantum yield in production. What's the current increase in grain yield that's occurring per year and what would be required, you think, in the future? And then how do we get to that required stage? Well, the breeders of rice, wheat and corn, which are the three major cereal crops for the globe, they make up something like 60% of the plant-based calories. Breeders now are lucky to crack 0.5% per annum in their improvement. So every year they can improve yield by half a percent. In the case of wheat, the Australian Wheat Breeding Program has made little progress over the last decade. They've produced varieties that are a little more drought tolerant and resilient, but the actual potential yield that those crops can achieve really hasn't moved very much. We need to go to around 2% per annum or more. And by 2050, which seems to be the magical time everyone talks about, we really need to have doubled cereal crop production globally. So that's quite a big ask. So I'm aware of some of the ANU's involvement in programs such as the International Wheat Yield Partnership, which is dealing with that exact issue to look at quantum change in yield. And that's nicely fusing our knowledge of fundamental biology with an applied outcome about how can we look at new traits in the energy biology space of plants? How do they capture light energy from the sun? And how do they convert that more effectively into yield? So that's one area where there's already a link between our fundamental research and something which is going to maybe lead to that 2% or 3% increase in yield in the future. Can you give me another example where we're using the fundamental science and linking it into an applied space? Yeah, well the Centre of Excellence that I lead, the Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis is really tasked at improving the efficiency with which plants harvest light and carbon dioxide from the air to make the final food product and our focus is on crops like wheat and rice, for example. So the process of photosynthesis is something that breeders haven't worked with. So to take a step back, a lot of the breeding strategies that we're using for our wheat and our rice came from pioneering work done in the 1960s. And that work really had such a big impact on cereal crop yields that we've kind of rested on our laurels a bit. So we've been using those tools again and again to provide these improvements in yield. But now there's a realisation globally that crop breeders have reached a plateau using those technologies. So they're asking us as plant biologists, what is the next generation of traits? What can we look for to breed with? And energy biology, the efficiency with which carbon once it's taken into the leaf gets used to produce yield as one of those traits. And photosynthesis and the efficiency of carbon capture and light harvesting, that's one of the other traits. So these are kind of frontier traits that the breeders want to work with to try and get us to that next level of crop production. So the work that you're doing with the Gates Foundation, how does that fit into that sort of narrative of being able to improve crop yields? Yes, well the Gates Foundation is an interesting one. The work we're doing in the Wheat Yield Partnership of course, that's working with existing wheat germ plasms. So these are wheat varieties, wild wheats that we can take many, many thousands of these and look for the best of the best. It's using the phonomics tools. It's a bit like the plant Olympics, you know, look for the best performing wheat plants. But if we want to move outside of what's available in our germ plasma bank, in our stock of wheat or rice seed, then we have to look at using more radical approaches of bringing genes in from other species of doing wide crosses with other species. And this is where the Gates Foundation came in. It's quite hard to get money to do these sorts of projects because they heavily rely on a wide base of basic strategic research and basic biology. They have to harness the academic outputs of many different scientists and focus on using those in a translational way. So back in 2008 we went to the Gates Foundation at the request of the rice breeders at the International Rice Research Institute with a plan to put 30 genes into rice from maize to try and turbo charge rice photosynthesis and increase yields. So the modelling we'd done suggested that we could double yields or at least increase them by 50% if we could achieve this goal. High risk, high payoff, we frankly didn't think we had much of a chance. But at the time, because of the landscape in global food production and this major food security crisis that was occurring, Bill Gates funded this work, 16 laboratories in 11 countries in a consortium with Australia playing a very much a lead role to turbo charge rice photosynthesis. And he called it an Apollo project, equivalent of putting a man on the moon. He signed a check for 12 million US on the spot and said he was in for 20 years and we're now coming into the 10th year of that funding. So that was a very, very much a visionary process of us not only making those incremental increases but making a real quantum leap. So to me there's a couple of elements that come out of that that's important. One is the duration of investment that's required to get true change that if you want to do a quantum change that's going on you require staying power that needs to be an investment over quite a long period by the government or by the private sector or combination of the two and it's difficult within a three year cycle that needs to be made. It requires a vision component about what we're trying to achieve and that might require buy-in to the top level by government and private sector which certainly the Gates has provided that but over the 25 year period they're willing to fund those sort of programs. The other part which is really interesting with that Gates one you're describing is the way in which they're taking 11 or so laboratories or whatever it is around the country, around the world with expertise and fundamentals of how organisms work and they're harnessing that then to create something new in the applied context. So it's that fusion between fundamental science and applied science which is the really crucial thing. You can't have one without the other. You can't get those applied elements without actually having the fundamental knowledge that exists there. So it requires essentially the long term commitment and it requires the funding of all elements of the pipeline that would take ideas out into industry space so the commitment for fundamental research is as important in the applied context. And it's a bit of a paradigm shift for academic research and also a paradigm shift for industry because in this funding landscape we're talking about this funding ecosystem if you like industry is often only willing to take projects that are very close to application because investing in something that's got a long term payoff is not cost effective for them. So they have investment from government and from donors like the Gates Foundation enables us to do these quantum leaps in our science that enable us to produce globally significant effects. So one of the things obviously the ANU is doing in that space to try to link that fundamental research with the applied outcomes that might emerge and have impact in society is the new Centre for Entrepreneurial Agri Technology that's been set up and that's now providing a sort of a pathway by which science that might be existing in the biological, environmental sciences, the computer scientists and engineers can then focus their expertise on challenges of modern agriculture that may provide, that will provide an additional vehicle by which the capacity of the ANU can now feed into dealing with the fundamental issues that agriculture is going to face. There's one other area which is interesting which I've seen here at the ANU is people who've got expertise in robotics. I saw one example really lovely one at the ANU where they're having to look at the challenges of harvesting for example asparagus. It presents a really interesting problem of the geometry of how one goes in to do the cut, how does actually the machine make a decision about where to do the actual incision and cut and then sample and so on. So it's a fundamental problem of mathematics, of engineering, of computer sensors and so on that all have to be brought together. So there's that robotic element that could emerge which is actually going to be used with a whole range of crops and whole range of settings in the field and also in control environments. But the thing which really fascinates me is that if you have communities now that rely on itinerant workers to come in and harvest crops at small times of the year and they find it really difficult to get workers to come in and work in those, there may be solutions in the future that are going to emerge out of the robotic space which enables them to do that harvesting in the future which is currently challenging. But then there's an interesting issue then. If you move towards robotics and you don't have the employment profiles that you have currently, what's it going to do to those communities in the future? So there's another area there in terms of understanding the social, the socioeconomic impacts of change that's going to occur and that's an area I think that government can take a lead in trying to actually look at the path that is possible there in terms of what might be occurring in regional areas in the future.