In The Field: # 10

Well, over the last 12 months at GRDC we've been looking at how we do business and we're looking at how we can actually establish the organisation, get it set on the right footing for not the last 20 years, but the next 20 years. And that really starts with our core business and that's our investment in R and D and our portfolio of projects. We've got over a thousand projects that we fund here at grdc and it's really important that we understand that portfolio and make sure that we've got that portfolio returning the best possible return to Australian grain growers. We've broken our portfolio into what we refer to as short term, medium term and long term projects. So short term projects are the sort of things that we can get on the ground in season, local, generally driven by regional cropping solution groups and their particular challenges that they've identified. And from those projects we're looking for really short term solutions that growers can be implementing straight away, go and see the trials, see the outcomes and then update the outcomes on their own farms straight away. So they're short term, quick projects within each of the regions, medium term projects a little bit more complicated, they often require a lot more technical expertise, tend to be farming systems type projects, soils, rotations, crop protection, typically addressing a challenge and typically may take us five to eight years to actually come up with the right solution, with all the right data to be confident, then to go to growers and say, hey, this is the way to tackle this particular problem with the right solutions. So that's what we're referring to as our medium term investments. And then we've got our longer term game changers projects which are unlikely to deliver a dividend within eight years, but are really going to give us those big gains. And in fact a lot of those projects are projects which are of national scale, the technologies which are going to be beneficial regardless of where you farm. And increasingly those projects are done in collaboration with international organisations and agencies overseas. They require critical mass that allows us to share the risk, share the costs, but also bring to bear technologies and expertise we just don't have here in Australia. So part of that reinvigoration is looking at exactly where we're located. For the 20 years that GRDC has existed, we've always existed in Canberra and it served us well. But GRDC has grown quite substantially over that period of time and we've relied very heavily on our regional panels to be our connect our conduit to local growers. And we've got to the point now where they need more support. Part of providing that support is actually opening some regional offices. We're opening four regional offices, one in Western Australia and Perth Adelaide in South Australia, in Toowoomba in Queensland and also in Dubbo in New South Wales. So our shorter term and our medium term projects we will be managing out of those regional offices. They'll be on the ground, they'll give us hopefully greater speed but also better connectivity with our grower stakeholders. Our regional panels will still be a really critical part of the way we do business. I mean our success, we see our greatest success in GRDC is knowing what growers issues are and their priorities and their research questions. And that's what's driven our whole research profile. And we don't intend to change that. We tend to keep that. I think the move to regional office actually strengthens our connect to Gross and it strengthens the regional panels and gives them the resources to be able to do their job properly, given the size and the growth in the portfolio over the last 20 years.