Welcome to 100 Climate Conversations. Thank you for joining us. I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We respect their Elders, past, present and future and recognise their continuous connection to Country. Today is actually number 70 of 100 climate conversations. This series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issues of our time, climate change. And we’re recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum, which was built in 1899 and it supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system in the 1960s. And so, in the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus towards the future. I’m Craig Reucassel, host of War on Waste and Fight for Planet A. So, Robert Furbank is an internationally regarded researcher leading the Furbank Lab at the Australian National University and is director of the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis. Furbank is part of the C4 Rice Project, an international initiative supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aimed at increasing rice yields. We are so thrilled to have him today, so please welcome me in joining Bob. All right, Bob, let’s start at the beginning. What brought about your interest in biology?

Yes, well, it’s a pretty interesting story. I’m a steel worker’s son from Wollongong, so a pretty unlikely biologist. And I was the first one in my family really to go to year 12 let alone to university. But growing up my parents, I guess, came from an era where they didn’t have much education and I think both of them were committed to giving their kids a better chance in life. So, I had a lot of encouragement to study and to get to university and make a career for myself. But it was a pretty rocky road to becoming a biologist because at high school I was given some career counselling and that counselling was, I was too hopeless at mathematics to ever be a scientist and I should focus on the humanities. And I was much better at English and history.

Really.

Yes, so it was an uphill battle. Finally, maths came together in year 12 and I made the choice to study Bachelor of Science at Wollongong Uni. That’s where my journey began.

And what led you into biology? What led you into that kind of the plants and that area?

Yes, well, I guess I had some inspirational teachers, at Corrimal High School where I went in Wollongong, and I can remember it was my physics teacher, actually, he had a prism and he was explaining to us how photosynthesis worked. That these particular wavelengths of light from the sun are absorbed by plants and using that energy they fix carbon dioxide from the air and that basically is the basis of all life on Earth — all the carbohydrates, oils, proteins that we have in our bodies and every other living thing come from that photosynthetic process. And I remember being really fascinated by that. And that came to the fore when I was choosing at the end of year 12 where I would go, but I hadn’t chosen really whether I wanted to do plant or animal biology at that stage. I just thought biology was something I was really interested in. Plus, I didn’t want to work at the steelworks like my dad.

Before we get into the technicalities, let’s actually turn to the problem I guess you’re looking to solve. What is the challenge in terms of feeding the population as we go forward from here?

Oh, we’re facing a huge challenge which is exacerbated by climate change and the fact that we’re going to be hotter and drier. And also, now we have enough granularity in the climate models to know we’re going to have more extreme weather events. There’ll be local areas where climate change is having more impact. What really focused my attention on the magnitude of the problem was a statement that was made by the chief executive of CSIRO back in 2009, when we opened the national facility, and she said that in the next 50 years we’d have to produce more food than we’d consumed in the whole history of mankind. So, that’s 200,000 years of our existence on the planet. So, for me, you know, you can draw all sorts of lines, but that really had a big impact on me, and it convinced me that we really needed to up the ante and move fast.

That is an extraordinary statement. So, this is what we’re facing. We’re facing these kind of competing challenges at the moment that we need so much more food for the growing population, and yet climate is inhibiting our ability to actually produce that food. Before we get into what you’re doing, let’s go back to that lesson you said at Corrimal High School — photosynthesis. Talk us through the process of photosynthesis, why it’s amazing and how it is relevant to your project.

Well, photosynthesis is the process where plants harvest light energy from the sun, and they use that energy to absorb carbon dioxide from the air to make carbohydrates, proteins and oils, which all of life on Earth relies on. And also, it evolves oxygen during that process. And without photosynthesis, we basically have no life on Earth. We’d have no oxygen, we’d have no food and fuel. So, it’s an extremely important process. And it turns out that many of our crop plants, that process is not optimised. There are ways to improve it and make them work better.

So, you’re looking predominantly at rice and wheat and trying to increase their yield, and is that by changing the way they photosynthesise or the pace, what’s the change you’re trying to make within rice and wheat?

Well, the thing I’m particularly interested in with our project with the Gates Foundation is to use a little bit of a lesson from evolution. Over the course of plants evolving on the planet, there are two different ways that photosynthesis can work. Photosynthesis can either absorb carbon dioxide directly from the air through the pores in the leaf, called the stomates. And the enzyme that does that is called RuBisCO, and that’s the enzyme that does all the hard work in our crop plants like rice and wheat. But in the hotter, drier environments, evolution catalysed the appearance of a whole new group of plants. And these plants are called C4 plants. So, the example of a C4 plant, we’ve got sorghum, maize, sugarcane, all of these highly productive tropical crops that are grown widely. And these plants are almost twice as efficient at converting sunlight into carbohydrates as crops like rice and wheat. And they do that by having what’s called a biochemical pump. And, you know, I grew up hotting up cars and doing mechanical things. And I always like to use a bit of an analogy with mechanics here. It’s like bolting a turbocharger onto a VW and making it into a Porsche. So, the C4 plants take carbon dioxide from the air and they pump it into a specialised compartment, where the RuBisCO sits, and they pump up the carbon dioxide concentration way in excess of how it will ever get to in climate change to about 10 times what it currently is in the air. So, the RuBisCO sitting in this soup of really concentrated carbon dioxide. It can work very efficiently without any waste. So, that’s how these plants can grow and harvest light so efficiently. And they really can produce huge amounts of biomass. So, rice might make, I don’t know, 30 or 40 tonnes of plant structure biomass per hectare of area as some of these C4 plants can make 100 tonnes per hectare. And someone told me once that there’s one of these C4 plants in the Amazon that can grow faster than the incoming tide. So, you know, it’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?

That’s extraordinary. Before we go into how difficult it is to hot up these particular plants, can you just give us some kind of idea of why you’re focusing on rice and wheat. I guess, their role in the world, how important they are and what happens if we don’t have enough of rice and wheat in the world?

Well, rice is the number one crop in terms of producing calories for the planet. Wheat comes in at number two, but sometimes maize or corn competes a bit with it, but nearly always it’s, rice is number one and wheat is number two. So, our two most commonly utilised crops on the planet use this more inefficient form of photosynthesis. I don’t know if folk are familiar with the Green Revolution, but back in the 1960s there was a period in crop breeding which was quite remarkable. We saw some massive increases in yield through the introduction into wheat and rice of just a few genes which could boost yield by up to 60% just in the space of a few years. And at that stage of the game, we’re really getting into trouble with the balance between food production and consumption. But this Green Revolution – and it was catalysed by a handful of people, including the Nobel Prize winning wheat breeder Norman Borlaug. They managed to make these new Green Revolution varieties that got everyone out of trouble, basically. And the gains they made were from repackaging the way that the crop grew. So, they reduced the amount of carbon that the plant was putting into its straw and stalks and the bits of the plant that couldn’t be used and optimised how much was going into the grain. So, those kinds of gains kept us going then for the next 30 years, really, or 20 or 30 years. But now what we’ve seen is we’ve pretty much maxed out on that approach. We’ve got now new varieties of wheat. Where more than 60% of a wheat plant is grain. So, if you go any further than that, there aren’t enough leaves or solar panels to absorb the light and actually fill the grain. So, when we started our rice work with the Gates Foundation, the crop breeders were coming to us and saying, Can you do something about photosynthesis? Because this is becoming limiting for our crops. We can’t get any more gains from our traditional approaches. We need to be able to get more carbon, more sunlight harvested and get more carbon into the grain and make more yield that way.

So, the Green Revolution that happened, you said in the 60s, that was a genetic modification of the way in which the plants worked, was it?

Well it was, but it wasn’t GM in a traditional form. I mean, GM it’s a bit like labelling something ‘artificial intelligence’. It covers a lot of different technologies and GM does as well. I mean, we’ve been genetically modifying plants for thousands of years by taking the pollen from one plant and pollinating another plant with it and making what’s called a cross. So, traditionally what breeders would do, they’d take two of their strains or varieties of wheat or rice, and they’d pollinate one with the pollen from another. And then they grow that up and see if that’d improve the yield. So, by doing that, you can bring whole chromosomes and whole pieces of DNA into the plant. But what you do with genetic modification, or now gene editing, is you can make very precise small changes rather than having to rely on bringing whole chunks of plant genomes together. So, in essence, we’ve been doing genetic modification for a very long time, but now we’ve got technologies that speed that process up considerably.

And I guess this is the question for your project here. How long have you been working on this attempt to go from a C3 through to a C4 pathway for rice and wheat? How long have you been working on it? What’s the kind of timeline of it? You know, how are you speeding this up?

Well, I have to tell you a bit of background for that story, because to convert a C3 plant into a C4 plant, you need more than almost 20 genes to do that — it’s a big problem. And to do that one gene at a time is a very, very slow process. We’ve now got techniques where we can put 10 or 15 genes in at once. But when we started this project back in 2008, this was a really blue-skies project. No one was doing anything like this. It was the most ambitious genetic engineering project on the planet. So, a group of us went to Seattle to pitch the project to the Gates Foundation, and we actually thought we had little chance of getting this funded, but it was almost like a perfect storm — 2008 was the first major food, modern food crisis on the globe. We’d consume more rice the previous two years than we produced. There’d been a very poor season in the northern and southern hemispheres for wheat. Global wheat reserves had dropped to 30 days of consumption. Rice prices doubled in the space of 12 months, to the point where the Thai’s, one of the largest rice exporters in the world, said, ‘Oh, we can’t export any rice, we can’t meet our local demand’. Wheat and grain prices rose so rapidly that there were food riots in Cairo about bread prices, and that was the beginning of the Arab Spring. And we were virtually on the plane on our way to Seattle when all of this was happening. So, when we arrived in Seattle, we had a pretty good chance of pitching this is an extremely important project to try and boost crop yields, not just by a little bit, but we needed a 50% improvement. So, the modelling that we’d done said that if we could make rice into a C4 plant, we could get a 50 per cent boost in yield in one go, but our project was going to take 20 years. I’d never seen a research grant that went for that long. But remarkably, the foundation received the project well. I’m told that Bill Gates called it his Apollo project — it was like putting a man on the moon — but, you know, high payoff, high risk, but worth the investment. And we’re still going. We’ve been working on this since 2009, and I’m pleased to say we’re getting quite a lot closer.

How many people are involved in this and from whereabouts?

Well, when we began, it was 16 laboratories in 11 countries and the initial investment was 12-and-a-half million dollars US for the first tranche of investment.

And what are you aiming at? Is it just the yield that you’re trying to improve or if you can make these changes, does it make it more resilient as well? What are the things that actually come out of this, if you can crack this?

Well, the beauty of these C4 plants is because they’ve evolved in such a harsh environment, they’re incredibly resilient. So, they’re much more high temperature tolerant. They use water more efficiently. They use less than half the amount of water for that given amount of carbon fixed and made into carbohydrates. And they’re also more efficient at using nitrogen fertiliser. So, if we can get this to work, we’ll get three times the bang for our buck, if you like, in terms of climate resilience and low import agriculture. So, it’s very attractive.

And is it gene editing or is it crossbreeding? Is it a mixture of these processes or how many processes are going into this?

Well, you still need to do some breeding, but at the moment we’re taking genes that we’ve identified are important in maize for this CO2 pump. We’re assembling them on a large DNA construct and we’re putting it into rice. So, at the moment we’re doing that in two steps. Then when we have something that works, we then have to do some crossing — so, traditional breeding to get it into one of the varieties that’s being grown at the moment in the field, that’s adapted to a particular region where we want to have an impact. So, it’s a combination of things.

Is it the case that you could spend 20 years on this, and it doesn’t work? And I guess what stage are you at? Like, you know, how hopeful are you at this point?

Yes, well, I guess the analogy with landing on the moon is pretty good one, isn’t it? You know, the rocket could crash, the lunar lander mightn’t actually make it, but you learn a lot along the way. So, a project that has been running for this long, the amount of knowledge that we’ve gained is incredible, not only basic knowledge about how plants work. So, what we’ve seen, it’s a bit like if you think about a tree growing, the tree’s growing up towards the light, but there are branches growing out all the time. So, this project produces branches that have resulted in improved rice yields that don’t have anything to do with a fully functional C4 photosynthetic pathway. But some of the parts that we’ve found along the way, when we’ve put them into the plant, they’ve had a positive benefit for other reasons. So, we’ve been having positive projects come out, blossom out of that growing project as we’re getting closer. But yeah, there is a chance that we won’t get there before Bill runs out of patience to fund this. But along the way, I think we’ve had some major impact, both from what we’ve learned about how plants work and in coming up with some rice varieties that have improved characteristics.

That’s interesting. So, with the climate challenge, you’re also faced with having to change the conditions that the rice and wheat are able to grow in. What are the main changes that are required to deal with the climate change?

Well, heat tolerance is a big one. Drought tolerance for paddy rice. It’s likely that we are moving away from having rice in flooded conditions if it’s becoming hotter and drier. So, even drought tolerance in rice becomes important, certainly very important for wheat. So, we need to improve photosynthetic performance, but not at the expense of using more water or becoming more sensitive to heat. So, we’ve continually got to have that climate lens on our activities, and we often do that with modelling. So, we’ve got some really nice mathematical models that allow us to predict what’s going to happen so we can combine that with a climate model prediction and say, well, in Narrabri, you know, — the model tells us that in 20 years’ time it’s going to be this much hotter and this much drier and so we can run a simulation and see if we change X and Y, in the photosynthetic pathway, is it still going to have a positive impact under those conditions or not? And if it’s not then it’s not worth mucking about with.

That’s amazing that you can kind of get to that level of modelling where you can kind of predict climate change’s effects on different communities or different regional areas as we go forward. Did you work on that particular technology?

The climate modelling I think Mark Howden’s been in, in the 100 conversations, I didn’t work directly in the climate modelling area, but what we did in our centre of excellence, we had a talented young guy working there who came up with some software that could incorporate our biochemical models into a whole crop model for wheat and for sorghum. So, he can take historical data from different parts of Australia and say, ‘Well, I’m going to put this data in and see if I can predict what actually happened that year for wheat yield in Narrabri’. And he’s got some really good results to show that he can predict that. So, we’re confident that we can then look at forward projections and say, ‘Well, what would happen if it was 10 degrees hotter? Or if you know, it was 20% drier?’.

And speaking about wheat, have you had similar breakthroughs on the front with wheat? You know, have you been able to find better yields in that front or is wheat proving harder than rice, for instance?

Well, wheat’s harder than rice for two reasons. One is, [wheat’s] what’s called the hexaploid and rice is a diploid. So, hexaploids have three lots of every gene in the rice genome. There’s three of them in the wheat genome. So, for every RuBisCO gene, for example, there are three copies of it in a wheat plant rather than one in a rice plant. So, it’s three times more complicated from its genetics and genomics. Plus, wheat traditionally has been more hard to put genes into. That’s improving now, one of the things I find amazing about our C4 Rice project, it’s been going for so long, the technologies have changed hugely. Synthetic biology wasn’t even a thing when we started. We had to put each gene in individually and then cross the plants, like with traditional breeding pollination. So, it took us six years to get five genes into one rice plant. Now we can do that in six months with synthetic biology and it’s looking like we can do our fine-tuning with gene editing where we can just make tiny changes in the genome quite easily. Plus, wheat was very difficult to put genes into, whereas there have been some new breakthroughs over the past 12 months which has made wheat very tractable to put genes into. So, I think we’ll see a rapid expansion of these technologies as we move forward. Building the turbocharger won’t be quite as hard as it was when we first started out.

You’ve been talking about, oh, we can make these very precise gene edits and that kind of stuff. There’s probably people listening to this who are, you know, hating it and freaking out about it because there’s a certain perception in parts of the community that gene editing is bad, that genetic modification had a very bad run. Do you think we’ve got to change the perception of that? I guess let’s start with the perspective of what are the things that we would probably consume normally in our diet now in Australia or otherwise that are affected by or have been changed by genetic modification?

Well, can I start with something that might demystify genetic modification a little bit? And I don’t want to proselytise, but wheat — I said it’s got three copies of all the genes in. The reason it’s got three copies is that it was a cross between three different grasses that wouldn’t normally mate with each other. So, it was like an unholy alliance of three grasses. One of those grasses looks like it’d grow in your lawn – it’s a major weed in fact, you know, you wouldn’t be allowed to do this today. And that brings all the breadmaking qualities into wheat. So, that was crossed with another species of grass. And so, our modern wheat that’s in our bread now was done with these wide crosses that brought all of these different combinations.

When was this done?

This was done maybe 60 to 80 years ago with wide crossing, and refined over time to make the modern bread wheats, and also our tomatoes. There are genes in tomatoes that you eat today that came from deadly nightshade because nightshades and tomatoes are the same genus, so you can cross them — even though they’re not the same species — and you can bring genes out of nightshades that give the tomato better properties, better keeping properties, etc. But food safety is really important, of course, and it’s really important for GM crops as well. So, I think you’ve got to separate the aspects of GM. You’ve got to separate the dominance by major agrochemical companies that occurred early on in GM crops from the ethical issues that people have with it, from the food safety issues. So, we’ve been doing this for 30-odd years now. There hasn’t been a single example so far of GM crops being a health issue. From a food safety perspective, there are issues around things like herbicide tolerance in some of their agronomic traits, whether that’s good for the environment or not, which are very pertinent. But we’ve got to look at those things separately and do a risk analysis. Is this worth the risk? And what I want people to think about is, when you want to make a new wheat variety – so, if I was to say, all right, I’ve got a wheat variety here that was some genes for this tolerance to high temperature and drought, and I want to bring those into a wheat variety and make a new variety that’s heat and drought tolerant. It can take 10 years to get from first cross to having enough seed to actually plant in the ground as a farmer. We don’t have 10 years. So, if I can say, well, I know what the sequence of that gene is, I can edit it in a wheat plant and I can get plants back in six months and then start crossing with them. I reckon it’s a no-brainer. Plus, the gene came from a wheat plant anyway so I’m not putting a fish gene in with strawberry, you know. So, anyway that’s my view.

I mean, yes, and would we be able to feed the current population of the world without genetic modification or the history of it so far?

Well, it’s going to be tricky. You know, I say to people, we’ve got to bring every kind of technology we can to bear. So, the whole GM thing’s only maybe 50% of what I do. The other half of what I do is to use high tech, artificial intelligence, machine learning, machine vision to try and sieve out the best of the best wheat and rice that we currently are growing. So, I can give those to the breeders and say, ‘Right, you’re ready to go with that straight away’ and it’s not GM. So, we need to be doing that. We need to be mining the genomes of plants we haven’t grown for a couple of hundred years. So, we’ve got all these gene banks all over the world now and the genomes of these crops that we haven’t grown for centuries, that we have seeds of, are being sequenced. So, if we can find genes in there that give us better heat and drought tolerance — we look at something that came from Syria or from an area where it survived well, in those conditions — we can immediately bring that now into early germplasm and take advantage of it. So, I think we need to be using all of the tools that we’ve got available because we’re going to need them. We don’t really have a lot of time.

I want to briefly move from– your research area is in wheat and rice, but do you have a personal interest in farming as well? You have a winery, you grow grapes. Do you use your knowledge from your research in your crops as well there, or is it a kind of different world?

It’s been interesting for me. My wife comes from a wheat farm in Western Australia, so and you know, I had no agricultural background. When we decided to take our passion for wine into planting a vineyard back in 1998, it was a bit like the Apollo project with the Gates Foundation — there’s no way this is going to work. But yes, my wife, her background with CSIRO was in tissue culture and growing plants and my background was in the biochemistry and understanding everything that was sort of under the bonnet, if you like. And it worked really well, it was a good partnership. And for me — because I wasn’t in touch with agriculture, but I was working on research that had translational impact in agriculture — for me, I learnt more about what it was like to farm and challenges and the input costs and what was important to a farmer, so that when I tried to focus my research on the challenges, I really knew what they were. You know, I wasn’t just reading the newspapers saying, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a drought’, you know. I knew what it meant. Even though wheat and grapevines are very different. The on-farm challenges are pretty similar. So, it was a two-way street. It helped my science and focus my translational impact for my agricultural work and my physiology and biochemistry was useful in getting the best possible grapes out of the vineyard, in the best possible wines.

It made you a better researcher by having that understanding.

Yes, it did. And you know, when I met with growers yes, we could make a connection. You know, I knew that the glyphosate prices had gone through the roof or that diesel prices were killing us or, you know, the price of nitrogen fertiliser was a problem. And so, I could build more of a rapport, and understand what the problems were and what we needed to do.

I mean this is the thing is like, who would be a farmer? Extraordinary I mean, already such a challenging area to work in and now with these changes coming through, it’s becoming even harder and harder. It’s interesting because I guess this feeds back into your work you’re doing with wheat and rice that, your challenge is not just to get wheat or rice that has a higher yield, it has to be far more resilient. It has to be able to adapt to a really hot season followed by a really wet season. That kind of stuff. Is this C3, C4 change you’re going for, does that help with that resilience as well? Does it change in that as well?

It will. But you know, the big challenge with translating your work into a crop variety that’s going to perform on farm is that a farmer doesn’t want a crop variety that’s going to give him, you know, a break-even yield in a poor year and the same yield in a good year. He wants one that’s going to give you a cracking good yield in a good year. And the break-even yield ind a bad year. So, you’ve got to come up with a combination of genetics that makes that work for them. And because we don’t– we can’t really predict too well what the weather’s going to do the next season — they have to take a punt and plant something. So yes, it’s a real challenge. C4 would give you a benefit across the board in Australia, and in many climates across the world, but it’s not the answer to everything. I mean, if you have a flood, nothing really is going to help you. But you know, I’ve got this vision and it’s based around what we can now do with synthetic biology that could be a real game changer. And it’s nothing to do really with photosynthesis, it’s something I call programmable plants. So, we’ve got these genetic switches that we’ve made now — completely synthetic, they’re not in plants at all — and you can switch them on and off by spraying things on plants. So, you can take a whole pathway, so say the pathway, a biochemical pathway that makes oil in, say, a canola seed and you can put it into the leaf of a plant with one of these switches in front of it. So, theoretically, and this is in my head at the moment, a wheat farmer could sew his wheat and then he could make a decision before the wheat even flowered — it’s going to be too dry to get a crop this year — he could spray it and it would make oil instead.

Wow

And you could harvest that and then you could put it into either the food chain or it could be make an oil, which you could use for aircraft fuel, or it could be what they do now cut it and sell it to the racehorse industry. But with an extra boost of being high value because it’s got extra oil in it. So, I think what agriculture is going to look like in 20 years’ time, it’ll be flexible, it’ll be agile, C4 might be there, but it might be an inducible one. We could switch it on if you need it, not if you don’t. You might call yourself a wheat farmer. You might call yourself a mixed farmer. So, you know, we already know that having a mixture of different things on your farm is a good way to provide climate insurance, graze and grain. You have a canola variety that you can put the sheep on, or you can harvest it if it’s a good year. So, my vision, I guess, for the future is to have crops that are flexible, too. They can be one thing or another. And I reckon that’s really the only way we’re going to stabilise our production systems. Particularly in Australia, is to have that kind of flexibility, I think that we’ve got the technologies to do it and I don’t want the young people out there to be doom-and-gloom and think, ‘Well, we’re all going to starve to death’ because I don’t think we will. You know, I think if we keep working hard on this, we’re going to get to where we need to be.

You’re interested also in how technology can be combined with agriculture to bolster our industry of the future. Tell us about your work with satellites. You really are leaving no stone unturned, aren’t you?

Yes. Well, my PhD supervisor, Hal Hatch, was a great thinker, and he was able to distil information out of data, incredibly. But he was a very focused individual, and still is, and he came to me once and said, ‘Bob, you’re never going to get into the Academy of Science, you work on too many things’. But it’s fun. I like working on lots of different things. And that’s kind of been my path in my career. And someone said to me once, ‘Oh, you’re an integrative plant biologist’, and I said, ‘Hallelujah’, somebody figured out what I am because I’ve got no idea what my speciality is. So, I get a buzz out of working from the gene to the globe, different scales, you know, from the genetics to the proteins to the leaves, to the crops to measuring things from space. What I said before about genetic modification and gene editing is only part of my research. The other part of it is how can we get as much information as possible on plant performance in the field, in crops with doing as little work as possible? Because every year in Australia, just in the wheat breeding programs, they plant a million plots of wheat out across Australia, each plot’s five metres long by two metres wide all across Australia, and measure the yield of it. And these trials, there’s so many and they’re so remote, you really can’t afford to be out there every day measuring things. So, during the year, they don’t have the resources or the money. It costs 30 bucks a plot just to harvest them and sow them. So, I was trying to figure out, well, how can we make measurements during the season to give us more information? And in my previous role at CSIRO, I’d been setting up a national facility to do this kind of work, but more at the ground level with drones and things. And maybe with satellites getting as sophisticated as they are now, where the pixel size, you can read a number plate, you know, surely, we can do something for the breeders with that. So yes, we’ve been having some success with getting – being able to use machine learning or AI, as we call it, to train algorithms to predict yields and properties of these crop trials across the country from satellite images. And the satellites they’ve just cranking away, you know, they go over once a day. A lot of the images just get thrown away because nobody wants them or won’t pay for them. So, at the moment we’re developing some algorithms for canola, but in a previous project — where the satellites were older ones so they didn’t have the resolution of a few centimetres, that was like a few metres — we could do it on the kind of farm scale, but now we’re doing it on these tiny little plots. So, I reckon that will increase the rate at which the breeders can crank out a new wheat variety and that’ll help push the window as well. If they can actually get measurements every day rather than just waiting ’til the end of the year and harvesting it and saying, ‘Well, this one’s better than that one. Yes, we better cross the two best ones together and see what happens’ — which is what we used to do in the olden days. Now, they’re using gene sequence to an artificial intelligence to help with that process as well. So, that’s the other aspect of my work is what we call plant phenomics, the phenome is what you get from the genome.

Well, it sounds like a much better use of artificial intelligence than what I’ve been trying out with ChatGPT so that’s fantastic. It is truly extraordinary, all of the work that you’re doing here and let’s hope this kind of moonshot works. It really does seem to have an amazing capacity to change our future. Please thank Robert for joining me. To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.