Australian farmers produce our food and agricultural research helps make it great.
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That was the message from The University of Sydney Narrabri Research Farm on National Agriculture Day last Tuesday.
To mark the inaugural event, staff used a 12m-wide header to write the word “food” in 60m-high letters in the middle of a durum wheat crop at “Llara”, the university’s newest research farm at Narrabri.
The paddock is 280 hectares and is on track to produce 840 tonnes of durum wheat – enough to make 1 million packets of pasta – according to Associate Professor Guy Roth, director of Northern Agriculture, The University Sydney at Narrabri.
The header was a state of the art machine equipped with GPS navigation for precision harvesting.
“It can also produce yield maps that show the variability across the paddock, which in future years enable continuous improvement,” Dr Roth said.
He said a special feature of this durum wheat variety was its brighter yellow colour, which has market appeal for many consumers, with Aussies eating about 200 tonnes of pasta a day.
“People like a naturally yellow pasta as opposed to a white pasta,” Dr Roth said. “For growers, it has a better grain quality and bigger seed size.”
The idea for the photo on the front page – which was taken from a plane by Josh Smith – came about after Dr Roth was talking to cropping supervisor Kieran Shephard.
“Kieran put the metrics into the header’s high tech navigation system and harvested the letters.”
Dr Roth said research and technology have allowed Australian grain growers to be among the most efficient, innovative, productive and sustainable in the world.
“We wanted to contribute to the National Agriculture Day to help the community understand some of the technology used to produce food,” Dr Roth said. “Food comes from farms via supermarkets. Whether it is a loaf of bread or a fresh cherry; plant genetics, the soil, water, environment, and a lot of technology and management combine to produce the best produce in the world.”
The Plant Breeding Institute undertakes key research and puts the innovations into the practice on its own research farm and with local farmers.
“It is a very busy time of the year for us. Various teams have been harvesting around 40,000 plots of unique types of wheat, chickpeas, faba beans and other crops,” he said. “We also have 1000ha of wheat, canola and chickpeas in our larger farming systems research paddocks. Harvest takes our team about a month’s work, seven days a week.”