Advancements are the long game

A friend of mine is a plant breeder. He’s smart. He works hard. 

As a plant breeder, you have to play the long game. 

If you make a cross in the glasshouse today, it might be 10 years before that variety gets to market.

Along the way, most of your work will be discarded. 

No yield improvement. Disease package not strong enough. Or perhaps the strain of rust has evolved so your once-resistant variety is now susceptible.

I think plant breeders make an enormous contribution to the environmental and financial sustainability of a cropping farm. 

Think about the pulse industry. 

A handful of people identified germplasm they thought might be suitable for production in Australia. 

The result is a thriving lentil, chick pea and faba bean industry. 

Farm businesses are more profitable, soil health has improved and we’ve spawned a wave of secondary industry across the regions — all started by a couple of plant breeders.

So I was pretty disappointed when my friend relayed a story from a recent plant science conference in New South Wales. 

A guest speaker at the conference, a supposed farm ‘leader’, berated the audience on the need to do more to keep his farm profitable. 

No matter this person owned a business worth many, many millions of dollars. No matter his wealth was well in excess of the people in the audience. 

He wanted more and they should deliver it.

This incident has revived the ghost of the ‘whinging farmer’ in my mind. 

In this time of great optimism in agriculture, a time of record crops, of ag colleges brimming with students, of rapid development of really cool technology, I’d hoped we’d buried the whinging farmer. But it seems not.

I do think farming is a tough business. Each season you take a deep breath and roll the dice to plant a crop. 

You ride every weather front, every frost. You ride the market volatility. And at harvest you scramble to secure your year’s work. 

It’s an emotional roller coaster. 

But when I try to identify an easy business I can’t find one. Owning any business is hard work.

There was a time when, as an industry leader, it seemed smart to complain. 

Run with the ‘poor us’ line in the hope you could leverage public sympathy to gain some sort of taxpayer-funded support. A bit of a short-term sugar hit. 

But is that really the best way to present our industry?

Modern agriculture can be proud of what it’s doing. The vast majority of farms are very well managed, sustainable businesses. 

There is, and always will be, the need to improve and refine practices. 

Often this will be achieved through partnerships with government and government agencies. 

So we should be forceful advocates for change and for public investment.

For me, though, it’s much better to advance our industry through sound reasoning. 

To demonstrate the economic value agriculture brings to this country. 

To demonstrate farmers are responsible and effective custodians of the land. To show we are in pursuit of the world’s best practice in agricultural production.

That would be playing the long game.