GRDC in Conversation: Mike Ewing

This series is a GRDC investment that takes you behind the scenes as we sit down with some of the people shaping our grain industry, uncovering their journeys, learning more about their passions and the projects that are part of their everyday. We are over in Western Australia. This is now the third part of what has been the GRDC In Conversation podcast. We've covered southern Australia, we've covered the north, across New South Wales and Queensland, and now we've headed west to meet with all sorts of growers, advisors, researchers and people involved in the Aussie grains industry. Welcome to the next series. Well, what I might do. I've got a little intro here, Mike, I'll read that to you. But I think. I think, Mike, when it comes to the In Conversation series, part of what we're doing with GRDC here, the bit of feedback I got from farmers was obviously, research is so important. Extension is incredibly important. But just the stories of different people involved in the grains industry is fascinating and it gives people something to listen to when they're in the tractor or in the car or whatever it might be.

It's really that time of year, isn't it? Yeah. At harvest or whatever.

Yeah, a great time of year.

Yeah.

And Mike, for you, you've. Your scientific research career has lasted more than 40 years so far. You're particularly well versed in the fields of farming systems, break crops and taking a whole farm approach to profitability. You served as the Deputy Chair of the Western Regional panel for GRDC and you've got a keen interest in the WA Broadacre cropping industry. As I did a bit of research on you, there was this love of plants which continued to come up and then I started to discover that it's not just agriculture. There's also his love of the coast and plants along the coastlines as well. So, Mike, welcome to GRDC in conversation.

Thanks. It's a pleasure to chat.

Mike, talk to me. This love of plants which people mention, what is it, this love?

Well, it's a bit more complicated than love, I guess. It's recognizing that we operate, particularly in Western Australia in. In a very hostile environment for plants. We've got everything from low and high rainfall, largely infertile soils, often associated with acidity and other stresses. And so plants that are going to cope with these conditions, both naturally or as managed plants in farming systems have to have special attributes. And the real challenge and the interest in plants comes from trying to fit those plants into that spectrum of stresses that they're facing. And then when you start to look, you realize how complex plant communities are and how when we want to use them in managed systems, we need to think very carefully about what we want and then go looking for it. And so through my career, I've sort of combined a patient looking at the gaps in our system, in our farming systems, and then thought about how and what we might use to fill those gaps. And so that's where the interest in plants comes. It's to do with finding those right ones, and particularly those spectacularly right ones that can make a real difference and change the trajectory of, you know, the agricultural system.

So, Mike, it sounds like as you, as you talk about some of those challenges, it could easily become like, quite overwhelming in terms of the challenges that especially Western Australian grain farmers face. What was it that really drew you into it?

Well, I guess it all happens incrementally and slowly, so it doesn't feel like it's overwhelming. And you had quite an interesting apprenticeship phase when my first appointment was at Chiltern as a generalist farmer advisor. And I spent five years there in a community that had a lot of new land farmers who were battling quite hard. And so, and they were facing, you know, complex problems both technically and financially. And so, and because they didn't have many sources of advice, they allowed you to have an insight into their businesses, which gave a real sense of the holistic nature of farming and the compromises that farmers make on a regular basis to try and make not only a successful biological system, but a successful economic system. So I got a really strong grounding in those issues and along the line learned to listen carefully to what farmers were saying, particularly about what they wanted or what they needed, and realized that I was in a position, a privileged position in a way, to think about potential solutions to their problems that they, because of their focus on the local, weren't necessarily aware of. So it became an opportunity to think about solutions in a creative way. And this doesn't, you know, careers don't sit in a vacuum. The Department of Agriculture, as it was then, had a fantastic array of senior scientists who, you know, took a lot of trouble to Blood junior people like me, and to, you know, try and interest you in their, in their passions. And so you were able to tie into some of those ideas and people that you're able to discuss about the science with. And so, and I think at that stage, through most of my career, the Department of Agriculture was a fantastic place to work, to do with the people that had historically attracted as employees and the support they gave to that practical science aspect.

Take me back 1972, when you started there, private agronomy wasn't really a thing. It was the government agronomist that was the, the keeper of knowledge.

Yeah. So there were the. The private agronomy business was just starting to get going and the, The University of Western Australia had sort of in the. In. In the form of their senior economics academic, Henry Schaper had been telling farmers that this would be a good thing to do, to get private advice that concentrated both on business advice and technical advice. And he had set up a foundation to start that process off. And interestingly, they went to. Recruited quite a number of people from New Zealand who had mainly got experience from livestock industries and dairy, but had this culture of being private consultants and a number of them set up practice and then gradually some people who'd done their early years in public sector moved across to complement those numbers later on. But at the time I started, there were really no. In the area that I worked, there were no private consultants. And so. And so the public sector allowed both one on one work with farmers. So that's rare now to have a one on one contact, but it was common in those times. And then as you gained experience, you tended to work more with groups. But in the early learning stages it was mostly one on one, which gave you deep insights into the farm and the business. And I always reckoned that in those times I could sort of monitor how deep my conversation was by the number of gates I opened. A lot of gates meant that we really got down to it and stuff came out, you know, in the, in the ute, ride around looking at pretty much everything. And those were kind of formative times and if you were prepared to spend the time they were, they were prepared to educate you.

And riding shotgun in a, in a ute and depending on how many gates you open, you could become privy to some pretty well important information, but also some pretty deep conversations in terms of part advice, but also part just ears and counsellor.

Yeah, well, I mean, I guess I was pretty immature in the sense of being seen as a counsellor, but it was important, I think, that to overcome some of that isolation that particularly new land farmers who are often living in pretty rudimentary conditions and, you know, in the end of a shed or, you know, often without much infrastructure, spending long hours doing, you know, menial things, to have a chance to talk to someone that was interested in their ideas was, was, I think, helpful.

Yeah. Interesting. So can you paint a picture for me what the region was like and what the farmers Were like was it a. It was a newly established cropping region was.

So it was a real mix of old land which was more the heavy land to the. To the east of the area but with a lot of relatively recently cleared land in the medium rainfall zone, both well in all directions from Geraldton in a radius of about 100 kilometers. A lot of new land. And it was really difficult. The systems of the time with cultivation and so on meant that it was very susceptible to wind erosion. And it wasn't a comfortable time really because there weren't at that stage many options other than cereal cropping. And so the first big part of my career was working with Perth based breeders and agronomists to work out how to get lupins into the. Into as a new element into the farming system. So the first commercial crops of lupins were grown about the year I started about 1972 with the first varieties which were uni white lupines for tall growing and not completely non shattering variety. And very little known about how to grow them particularly in that environment. So I spent quite a lot of that early stage doing field based for on farm research experiments on the agronomy of lupins as the local practitioner with a more senior agronomist somewhere else doing issues of nutrition, rhizobiology or variety comparison, sowing rates. All the basic agronomy was done in that period from about 72 to 76 and it was a period of quite good season. So it took off, went from zero to about 30,000 hectares over that period. Subsequently it fell flat for a period as weeds started to come in and there weren't herbicide solutions sorted out at the time. But it was a really interesting phase and, and many growers captured the idea that the legume could be incredibly useful to them. So the other alternative was a pasture legume and in many cases they didn't have the infrastructure for livestock management. So the concept of a crop legume was very attractive.

And was it at a similar time that legumes were just getting started that there really was this flatlining of productivity as well? Like were legumes part of that solution or were they actually right in the midst of it as well? Although there was a new crop, it was still challenged from a productive lens.

I think at the start most growers were really thinking more about the productivity so the grain production from lupins. It was only as we started to do some rotational experiments that we began to realize how influential that was. And the other major system issue was that most of those areas were very Phosphate deficient. And at that Stage in about 1972, the bounty on phosphate came off. And so the subsidy. And so the price of superphosphate went from $14 a tonne to $70 a tonne in one year. And so suddenly they, whereas they may have been able to justify high phosphate rights prior to that in a pasture phase, for instance, that, that became much more difficult to finance. And so the idea of being able to justify the first fertilizer inputs at the time that crop was growing was much more attractive. And that turned the economics of nitrogen and phosphorus. So up to that point, most farmers had used phosphorus to grow legumes, mainly sub clover or annual medics, and that was their nitrogen source. When phosphorus became really expensive, it just changed that pretty much in an instant. And it became much more attractive to, to either use fertilizer nitrogen, which wasn't then in practice very much, or to grow something like lupins, which didn't need nitrogen fertiliser.

So and with the, that cost of production, whether was it four or five times like similar. And it's something that also my generation hear a lot of. At the same time, interest rates were kind of through the roof. What did you notice about, I guess the mentality of farming back then?

The farming mentality at that stage was very much more about getting out and doing stuff. So, you know, the scale of the machinery and so on and the requirements for operations meant that there was a much more protracted period of planting and soil preparation and planting that went from whenever it started to rain without much crop being sown before the middle of June and then often into late July. A lot of time spent on tractors. And one of the things we did in that era was because of the financial pressure that was on people was we went out and ran workshops on cash flow budgeting. Almost no growers had a cash flow budget that they worked to. They just worked from one end of financial year to the, to the next, informally or formally getting an overdraft from the bank. The bank not demanding, you know, the proof of their concept, just going on gut feel largely. And so it was, it was quite a different, quite a different culture. If a grower spent half a day a month in the office, he was questioning himself as to whether he was getting his priorities right. That was the kind of the culture. And I mean they were certainly interested in learning more and they often went to their local and regional field days. The field days at the research station were always well attended and people were thinking, but they were thinking more about productivity and not so much about whole farm economics, if you like.

And to that point, a part which I'd say from the outside really defined you was your approach to risk. And it was going, okay, let's, let's manage the business for the bad years and make sure that it doesn't inhibit the good years.

Yes, well, I think over time, I mean that changed really quickly because of realities. And so financial competencies in the farming community lifted very fast and it was associated with the proliferation of the next generation of consultants who, who universally went out there and did a cash flow budget with their clients and developed a seasonal plan. And so that became, that was in itself a risk reduction process. It wasn't till a bit later that, where more options I guess existed technically that the more complex farming systems questions came to, into, into focus.

And for you, you, you were really at the early stages and, and modeled the dry land agricultural system or model of integrated dry land agriculture system. Midas. Talk to me about how did that come about?

Well, that was a bit later. So between, so I went and had a, a sojourn working overseas from 19, the late 70s for three years working in North Africa on a project that the Department of Ag supported technically, which was a fascinating venture. And they're about to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that activity and a lot of WA farmers and related skill sets where you went. So there were 20 Australian, West Australian personnel there at any one time. And it went for nearly 10 years. So a lot of people and I, and so I spent three years there as the agronomist supporting of that project. And for one year I was in charge of it, which was a big stress, developing 50,000 hectares of pretty much what you say, virgin cropping country in coastal North Africa. A big interesting challenge, but part of it for me was this again this opening up of my eyes about plants and their adaptation. So in this low rainfall feeding into semi desert, there was still a great diversity of plants and leguminous plants present. And it came as a big surprise to me that, you know, you could walk through the semi desert and still find the plants, things like annual medics that we were, we were using, you know, in our farming systems. And so my first venture into plant collection happened there. I was able to partner up with the staff from an FAO project and organize the Libya wide collection of annual medics, which ended up being some 2000 selections that we collected and preserved and put into storage and subsequently developed varieties suitable for Libya for their very testing environment. And so that was the Other aspect of that was I was working side by side with a group of very motivated Australian farmers who were again, adapting to this system. And so becoming aware that things that we were doing were for a reason. I'm. And having to understand that in order to explain it to other people was quite a different experience.

And you've talked about the perspectives of seeing how plants adapt. What did that work in Africa teach you about and show you about the perspective of agriculture people around the world and the role of agriculture in developing countries?

Well, I mean, for. First of all, it showed me that mostly people didn't have any idea what their local resources were. And as I met other scientists working in the area, realized that they didn't have. But there were several Australian scientists who were championing that idea. Probably the most notable from my point of view was Dr. Clive Francis, who was, who was a breeder of sub clover. And he had realized that sub clover existed in Mediterranean Europe, even though the early selections were of varieties that had arrived here accidentally. He then started going out and actively collecting sub clover and making and documenting his collections. And as soon as I started reading his collection reports, I realized that he was looking for sub clover, but he was seeing lots of other things, and particularly in places like Sardinia, in Italy, where the soils were equally infertile to ours, there was a huge diversity of both sub clovers, but also other species. And so my mind ran to, well, what about these other species? And, and would they fill some gaps not only in our soil array but also in our farming systems demands? So we'd grown up with this system around lay agriculture, which is the cropping phase followed by a pasture phase that's based on legumes. So that's classically what we call the lay farming system. And that was based around the idea that the pasture phase needed to survive through the cropping phase with seed reserves and then come out the other side and keep going without being re. Sown. And that worked with both sub clovers and medics. But, you know, was that the ideal or could. Were there other systems? And that's sort of where I started from.

And then, because your work was, as you said before when, at the introduction of lupins was really around, how do you stay ahead of resistances and weed burdens in it? Would you say that was a defining problem of your, of your career?

No, I mean, I think what, what I learned from that is that, is that, you know, mature systems need to have resilience and, and so you, you need to have a, have a, an agronomic system that deals with those stresses and hopefully anticipates them. So, you know, you, you really need to. And the idea and the concept of agronomic packages I guess emerged in that time where you didn't think of it as a simple one dimensional economy. You had to put together the systems. So when I came back from working three years in Libya, I was offered several opportunities, but I chose to go to Meriden in the low rainfall wheatbelt where there hadn't been any research personnel located on site for forever, basically. And so it was a clean slate. And the systems, I would say, were rudimentary in the sense that they were those basically lay systems. And at Meriden and east of Meriden they weren't working all that well because they really were generated for somewhat higher rainfall areas. So it just seemed to me there were lots of gaps and opportunities. So the first thing I did when I went to Meriden was to use my experience with lupins in the Geraldton area and to try and work out this package for low rainfall weed belt systems. So, and fortunately I discovered a very forward looking grower who was on the same journey. And so we worked together to share insights into what that package might look like and then tested it in that area. And so we started that in 81 and by about 85, the 300,000 hectares of lupins growing in that medium low rainfall wheat belt, it was just a gap that was so obviously needed for a crop legume that could, it just, I mean, there was also some very good extension by my extension colleagues, but essentially it sold itself and so it just went berserk really.

So why did it take into that moment if it was such an obvious problem?

By that time the herbicide elements of that package had been sorted out. So there was a bit of a hiatus with lupins from 76 to 80 as researchers caught up really with what was required. And the package using Simazine and atrazine and other herbicides came to be well and truly understood. And so as soon as that happened, the reinvention of the early efforts became to the fore. And statewide lupins went from, by 1990, they're up to a million hectares or something. So, you know, again, it was a, it was a big deal, a little.

Bit happening, a little bit of a change. When you look back at your, your career, was there a period where you think it was the mo, either the most defining or the most rapid change in development that you, you look at?

So probably the thing that the, the next thing that I got into was probably the thing that was, was most in a way most impactful for me and I think for adoption. So when I looked at those pasture systems for the low rainfall areas, it was very clear that neither sub clover was really not well suited to below 400 millimeter annual rainfall. And the annual medics that were available and were suited were really confined to the heaviest textures soils, which is not a big part of the landscape, but important but not huge. So my argument then was, well, we need something that has the attributes of the medic, but it can grow on more soils. And so that's when I went back to those collection reports I mentioned and looked at what was growing, where clovers was growing. And I realized that there were some species of medics, not the truncateular medic which was the variety cypress which was very widely grown, but there was the species Medicargo polymorpha burmetic that was commonly found. And it just struck me as odd that no one had picked up on that. And in fact I subsequently discovered that someone had bought some germplasm together and the student had done a PhD looking at that, but it hadn't gone anywhere commercially. So I went back into the collections and found also decided that we wanted something that wasn't going to cause fault in wolves. So we looked for a spineless version of that. And in doing that we discovered that there was actually quite a useful collection available from genetic resource centers around Australia. And we put it together and started to test it. And what we found is that it grew extremely well over quite a wide range of sites in the year we we planted it because it was inoculated with the strain of bacteria that was from the use for the trunk medics. But in subsequent years nitrogen fixation was suboptimal. So again I went back to the, to the ecological logic and said if these plants are growing in, in Sardinia, maybe they got a different bug that's adapted to those acid soils. So I arranged for a collection of those bacteria to be made and we brought them back to Australia and isolated them and started testing them. And this is where a really important partnership that I formed with microbiologist John Howson with his supervisor Dave Chatel over the periods from about 83 to about 86,7. We then worked out which plant amongst those burmetics was the right one and which strain of bacteria was the right one, put them together. And it was pretty revolutionary really. Again, very, very rapid uptake because that was the wool burn. And so we just got Our tools in place at the right time in the, in the economic cycle. And it just took off. And between 86 and 89, 90, nearly a million hectares of pastures of that burmatic pasture was established across wa. And it did grow extremely well over quite a wide range of medium textured soils, a lot of the sand over clay and the like. And it went fantastically for that period. Field aids everywhere across, you know, the southwest with, and again, good collaboration with the extension research people across the spectrum. And it just took off and yeah, but then it hit the wall, the wall downturn and investment slowed very, very rapidly. And so it's still a technology that works very well in some circumstances. Some of the original plantings are still going 30 plus years later. But, but it was a really important lesson about, about if you look hard, you can find what you need, you know, and it's just really a matter of resources and logic and you can probably get, get there. So that, that was a huge confidence boost for, for me to see that. But and confidence boost in several level levels. One is about the plants being available, but if you. The other one was about getting the right partnerships. So you know, getting that, you know, really isn't a unidimensional skill set. You need to have access to, to partners with wider skills so that you can cross over your skill set. And so that partnership with the rhizobiology team was very successful and a very nice way to do business, I guess.

Mike, one thing I really did want to ask you about because obviously your career is so defined in research. When the opportunity came up to become a GRDC Western panel member, you really scaled back and wound back on that research. Why was that important to you and why did you make that decision?

Well, I mean, I guess it happened earlier than that really. So I guess there's a phase we haven't talked about. Maybe you should step in back to that. But during my period at Meriden, I was looking, you know, through the eyes of farmers at their system and you know, I mentioned I thought it was a rather. Yes. Narrow system at the time. And then so you then think, well, what can I do to it? And then you have to ask the question, is it going to work? You know, what if it works, how beneficial will it be? And there was really no methodology to deal with that in a complex system sense. And farmers were telling me the same thing. They were getting advice based on gross margin budgets of a crop in a single packet in a single year. And to them they recognized that was a naive view of farm economics. And so we again, looking for outside partnerships. I raised this question both within my research team, but also with the economics group that were operating within the Department of Agriculture at the time. And very fortunately, one of the, one of the economists had recently done a PhD where he looked at the optimized use of water in the Southwest, WA thought. And he used this technique that involved quite complex mathematical formula to compare all the options and come up with the most profitable one so that it was a profit maximizing process. And we then speculated, well, could we do this for the farming systems of the wheat belt? And we realized that it would be a really a big task. And there was actually quite a lot of resistance from people who were typically used to a biological only approach to R and D. But eventually we got some support and some funding to explore this opportunity. And over the next two years we got a lot of researchers to provide us with data sets that gave us the relationships that allowed us to do profitability functions, inputs versus reels, all that for all of the things we needed. And spent a lot of time trying to visualize at what level the farming system needed to be expressed at to get these insights that would be useful in deciding whether a new thing you put in there would perturb it positively. And so we call this MIDAS model of an integrated dryland ag system. And David Morrison, my economics partner, was, you know, incredibly ferociously ambitious to do this. And at the time, computers basically were not micro computers, it was just macro computers. And the problem we tried to solve was not solvable by any computer in wa. So we had to negotiate with CSIRO nationally and we had to, for one run of the model, which was, you know, now would be regarded as a small job, we used to have to produce cards that held the program, have the card readers operated at the university's WA computer center, sent overnight by landline to Canberra Central computer. One run of the model and then the results came back in the morning the following day. And usually what it came back telling you was that you'd done some silly programming error and so you corrected that and moved on. But we started to build a really good team of economists. So David Morris and mentioned it. Ross Kingwell was the other incredibly talented economist who was part of the team and followed by David Pannell who was a new graduate and he's now professor of Ag Economics at uwa. Again, an enormous talent. So my contribution to that was actually deciding, I think, what level we needed to model the farm at. So we spent time looking at all of our soil maps and saying, well, what minimum number of soil types that you really need to deal with separately to capture all of this plant by soil interactions? And that's. And what, how much do we have to put the information in about the fertilizer decisions and all of the other things that go together. And really the only way you can test these models is if they come up with a believable answer. And so we then had to go take those answers, workshop them with motivated growers and it went from there. But by about 86 we had a model running which we thought was actually telling us, you know, giving us insights into how, how we could improve the, the farm. And it came up with some really interesting conclusions that were fairly generalizable whatever we did. And one was that there is, there's a certain level of cropping that you needed to do to capture the most of the benefits and then the marginal cropping that you went so, and that was usually 60 or 70% of the farming crop. If you went much more than that, it could marginally improve the profit or it may reduce. It depends on the soil type mix. But it was. The mixed farming system has a lot of inherent risk reducing strengths and we shouldn't just throw out livestock because at the time it looked like it was a strongly balancing enterprise. And so that then led to my main interest was in pasture legumes into thinking well what do we need to do from then on? And I guess going to your question, I then became more of a team leader than, rather than a slaves up researcher than every day in the field researcher, which I'd been up to, mostly up to that point. And so then it becomes as you start to manage teams, things that the stresses are different and you're then preoccupied with getting funding for the, for the group and for the, you know, for your strategic initiatives and so on. And so yeah, you move into a more managerial leadership role which, well, that's what happened in my case anyway. So from, you know, the mid, from about 1990 onwards that was, you know, embedded in research but with a leadership managerial emphasis. And that flowed into being a participant in three big national research programs. One, the first one on legumes, center for legumes in Mediterranean agriculture. And then a second one on salinity and then a third one on perennial plants. And in those three initiatives that ran for the next 15 or nearly 20 years, I was, you know, either a program manager or a research director of those initiatives. So it became much, much less hands on. And of course being national, those Then meant we had to build teams right across the country and integrate a wider set of opportunities really into our research approach. And I decided by about 2013 that the stress of traveling east 10 or 15 times a year was starting to weigh heavily. And so I was looking for a different way of operating and scaling back. So that's when I thought, well, this is an ideal time to get involved with grdc. Bring some of those local and national insights that I've had and see whether that could be a useful contribution to the, to the really important decisions about where, how we prioritize that research. Resource. Research funding, resource.

Yeah, hugely important. One probably final area that I do want to ask you about and maybe it was just more of a passion area, but I guess, yeah, the Cottersloe coast care and being able to grab that knowledge that you've got of obviously, you know, agriculture and plants, but actually being able to provide it back into your local community down in the coast and on the fringes of the city.

Well, you know, it's got many of the same elements. It's an incredibly challenging environment. We just had a month of, you know, westerly winds at about averaging about 70 knots and but you know, it's infertile, non wetting, all of those difficult things and it's been completely degraded over, you know, over the last, well, last century to the point where there weren't hardly any remnant native plants there. So you know, a community group had formed up and early on I was just really there to mainly. Well, I chaired the meetings and got the community group together or kept them together if you like, on focus. But gradually, as I ramped down my physical research, I started doing much more active on ground stuff and we've I think now worked out a way of doing it much more efficiently than we used to and lots of other people have, are interested in what we do. So it's quite similar really in many ways. But it's nice to have that sense of community as well.

Yeah, and you love a challenge, Mark.

Yeah, well that's true and I think it's the human element of the research thing is incredibly underrated. So in our cooperative research centers. But the thing that we spent a lot of time working on was making sure we had the right team leaders to not only get the technical focus right, but also to manage the teams harmoniously in a situation where there were potentially tensions across states and across organizations and, and there is a real skill in managing those things and well, first of all getting the right strategy, but then bringing people on board to the strategy and having them commit themselves to a common objective is something that's not relatively difficult. And so, and now with our research initiatives, almost never are we running with single disciplines or locations. You know, teams are the essence of these important initiatives. And so finding the right people to lead teams is really almost as important as anything in the whole spectrum.

Yeah. And I guess just. Oh, I love that last point, but one piece, I'd love to know some advice to me and other young people coming into the industry, what would be your advice to us? What are some of the learnings and the wisdom that you've captured that we should really keep front of mind as we go forward?

Well, I think that there are probably several things. One is it's really difficult to get in a complex business like agriculture. I think the first five years is critical in getting a breadth of understanding that allows you to express creativity. So it's really difficult to be creative while you don't understand the systems. And of course, seeing five different years in a row, you get insights into just the seasonal effects and so on. So you just have to work really hard at accumulating that base experience. But then once you have that having the confidence to find your gap and look hard for those opportunities, and then now we have the methodologies to decide whether that's really going to work. We have tools that allow us to be skeptical and analytical about, about those things. You know, what, what impact would it have on the economics of a farm? You know what, what are the barriers to adoption? If that. And if the answer is they're too difficult, you just close that opportunity off and move to another. You know, you have to be creative but rational about those things. And, and I think the relationship with growers is incredibly important. So you need to learn to speak comfortably with growers. And creative listening, I think, is at the heart of that. So you're open in a discussion with growers or grower groups, but you're not captured by them. And you are then able to bring your scientific knowledge and skills to the full and add to what they're telling you, not just taking their problem solving or problem.

Senses their word as gospel.

Yeah, I mean, farmers almost universally know what their problems are, but their ability to establish a range of options for solutions is not as understandably, not as wide as others who have a different background. So it's a matter of optimizing those circumstances. And so, yeah, I think having a relationship with growers and not a passive one, going and looking for the people you need to have that discussion about the opportunities and issues and spending time. I mean, it's the old thing about opening the gates. You know, you've got to have a situation where you're getting at those things. And obviously there's not so many gates to open these days, so have to work out something else. But I think the opportunity for getting insights from motivated growers and the interesting thing is that from my experience, almost never do you get knocked back if you want to have a discussion about such matters. They're very open to sharing their insights.

Absolutely. Well, Mike, thank you so much for taking the time for a chat with us. And I know there's gonna be lots of people who have come across your work who have been beneficiaries of the work that you've done over your career, and now they know a little bit more about you. So thank you so much for the time.

Pleasure.

Cheers, mate. Thanks for joining us for the GRDC in Conversation podcast. This series is a GRDC investment that's sharing the stories of the people who are living and breathing the Aussie grains industry. Make sure you check out some of our other conversations and hit follow on your favorite podcast app to never miss an episode.