Wheat

Future Ready Crops
Creating step changes in the productivity of broadacre and horticultural crops, with a focus on improving climate resilience, reducing input requirements and increasing productivity.

Cropping underpins Australia’s agrifood sector, from grain export earnings to meat production. Our broadacre crop staples cover 22 million hectares of farmland, yield 66 million tonnes annually and improve pasture cover by 40 million hectares. Together these staple crops are the backbone of our crop export and intensive livestock production sectors.

Agricultural industries are dealing, and will continue to deal, with the compounding impacts of climate change in the coming years and decades. Climate change effects vary regionally, require distinct mitigation and adaptation strategies, and have differing impacts on communities. Growers will need specific products and tools to ensure food production remains profitable and aligned with domestic and overseas needs. Decision-making platforms must enable farmers to confidently make decisions at plant, crop, farm and value chain levels, based on reliable and interpretable data. We also need to build transformative readiness and capacity across the innovation ecosystem at the grower, farm, region, sector and ecosystem levels.

A crucial part of adaptation to climate change will be designing, producing and delivering high-yielding, nutritious crops that are responsive to changing environments and can better withstand climate extremes including drought, heat, frost and other biotic and abiotic stresses, while also requiring lower levels of external inputs. 

There is also a need to provide farmers with the appropriate tools to manage crop system outputs in response to climate and market demand, including being able to switch crops mid-season to produce high value alternative commodities.   

Investment opportunities

To address these challenges the agrifood sector will need to invest in developing:

  • new mechanisms to improve yield potential and yield resilience/stress tolerance of crops
  • robust and efficient pipelines for gene editing, crop transformation, phenotyping and data mining
  • quicker ways to assess genes of interest and/or promising new varieties
  • policy proposals and analysis of the regulatory and social landscape to ensure faster deployment and adoption
  • development of the next generation skills necessary to drive ongoing crop research innovation
  • development of novel crop products, technologies and management strategies
  • sharing and testing of spillover technology benefits to other sectors.

Focus areas

The Future Ready Crops theme will be delivered using a user-centric co-design approach, by engaging with government, industry and community stakeholders. It will focus on translating Australian National University (ANU) capability to impact in areas including:

  • novel traits to improve crop (cereals and horticultural) yields and quality under future climate
  • integration of molecular and physiological approaches to improve abiotic stress tolerance
  • increasing nitrogen use efficiency/exploiting natural nitrogen fixation capacity to reduce input costs
  • high-throughput methods for rapid phenotyping of field-grown crops to accelerate trait selection
  • exploiting advances in synthetic biology and changes in the regulatory environment
  • better use of environmental and biological data to create crop-relevant digital agriculture solutions
  • the social, environmental, regulatory and economic impacts of future ready crops.

ANU capabilities and expertise

ANU has world-leading research, technical capability and infrastructure to help deliver future ready crops to the agrifood sector. This includes the state-of-the-art facilities and infrastructure that are needed to drive research targeting accelerated crop development, including: 

ANU has academic expertise in: