How CSIRO will turn $150m into $20bn to help Aussie farmers fight drought

For CSIRO, turning a $150m into $20bn to help Australian farmers is not the stuff of science fiction.

CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall says while Australia may struggle to compete with Silicon Valley on tech, but when it comes to agriculture it can go head-to-head. Picture: Hollie Adams

When Larry Marshall, chief executive of Australia’s peak science agency CSIRO, talks to farmers, he replaces the word “science” with “profit” in an effort to sign them up to hi-tech, drought-busting schemes.

The two words are intertwined, and as CSIRO leads a $150m investment aimed at creating another $20bn in value to Australia’s agriculture and food industries by 2030, appealing ­directly to the hip pocket is the best way to get farmers on board.

The premise of the investment – which CSIRO is leading in partnership with government and industry – is simple: increase farmers’ profits during the good years to weather the bad, following an age-old mantra.

But its full scope is much larger. Not only is it aimed at deploying water-saving and other drought-busting technology, it also seeks to cement Australia’s role as the “delicatessen to the world”, targeting fake food producers and other counterfeiters to capture more value – and profits – for farmers.

“Our farmers have had to do it tough forever,” Dr Marshall said.

“But that sort of adversity tends to drive innovation, and I’m always amazed at how willing farmers are to have a go at something different.

“We’ve been working in the lab, but we need to make it real by getting it out on the farm. For (combating) drought it’s really three scopes of work. One is on the actual individual farms and deploying this technology to basically grow more crops at a higher yield, but use far less water.

“It sounds impossible but that’s why you need science to reinvent it so it is possible.”

And here’s where talk of dollars and cents comes in.

“For an individual farmer, less water means more profit, high yield means more profit and less sensitivity to drought or the impacts of long-term climate shifts again means more profit,” Dr Marshall said.

“If you start with the word profit, not the word science, then it’s much easier for them to get their arms around why, why we want to do it.”

Dr Marshall’s mission is not that of a city slicker imposing his views on those who are the salt of the earth. His family, from both parents, grew up on properties from Western Australia to NSW to Queensland.

“As a kid, droughts are that thing you remember because there was never enough water and you’re always in a battle,” he said. “But what I didn’t remember as a kid so much – I remember fighting the drought – but, bloody hell bushfires and mouse plagues. Farmers have had it so tough the last sort of sort of 10 years. It’s just been remarkable.”

The CSIRO has enjoyed a successful partnership with farmers. Dr Marshall said they had let the agency deploy “all kinds of things to try out” on their properties, from nuclear radiation sensors to next generation photogrammetry and electromagnetic anomaly detectors.

“It’s always funny because they say, ‘what the hell is this?’ But there’s a strong appetite in Aussie farmers to have a go at something a bit different.”

For Dr Marshall, it’s a sweet spot that combines his family history on the land with his career, which has mostly been in Silicon Valley, where he founded six successful US companies in biotechnology, photonics and telecommunications as well as served as managing director of venture capital firm Southern Cross Ventures.

“I would never try to compete against Silicon Valley in tech because they’re all over it,” he said.

“But they’re not all over agriculture, and we’ve taken a couple of very targeted shots, head to head with the valley.”

These shots include plant-based protein outfit v2food – the company behind Hungry Jack’s Rebel Whopper – that took aim at America’s Impossible Foods and Impossible Burger.

Now the $150m investment will build on that, aiming to slash the effect of drought by 30 per cent, increase the value of Australian agrifood exports by $10bn and produce an additional $10bn of high-quality protein products – and all by 2030. All categories are called “missions” with clear objectives.

Increasing the value of exports takes aim at food counterfeiters, which in the past decade have ripped off anything from Penfolds wine – look at China’s Benfolds, which is unrelated to the singer – to branding cherries from Chile as Tasmanian-grown, to copying David Blackmore’s Wagyu beef with a protein that’s anyone’s guess.

The challenge, Dr Marshall said, was staying one step ahead of the counterfeiters. And CSIRO may have found an answer in the wine industry.

Terroir – which covers how soil, climate and elevation affects grapes and the resulting wine – also leaves an imprint on other foods, from beef to cherries.

“With plant products, we found if you use radiation and isotopes, you can actually tell the soil and water from where the plant was grown, so using just the product itself, you can track back to its point of origin,” he said.

“The trick of the mission was convincing ourselves we could take this very expensive equipment and turn into something very simple and low-cost … making that equipment cheap enough so that a store, vendor in another country can actually have it or a supplier in another country can actually have it and it not impact their profit.”

So when will the rubber hit the road?

“The missions all have very clear deliverables, but then there’s milestones along the way,” Dr Marshall said.

“We’re doing stuff with the Tasmanian salmon industry already, because that’s a high value product that is a bit of a target for counterfeiting. There’s a couple of big cherry growers in NSW and Victoria that were able to work with us on cherries to do the isotope sensing, so we’re already doing it.”