Protected cropping could be the key to ensuring Australia’s food security while increasing horticultural yields, a prominent researcher believes
Protected cropping is set to take leaps forward after a Melbourne research hub received $5 million in federal government funding to explore its capabilities in horticulture.
The hub, located at La Trobe University’s AgriBio facility, will spend the next five years exploring how protected cropping can benefit horticulture by ultimately creating higher yields and quality with lower inputs.
As the name suggests, protected cropping involves growing horticultural crops in protected spaces such as greenhouses.
This provides protection from weather, pests and diseases while also enabling the modifications of growing conditions to suit individual crops.
Increasing yields and reducing growing times are two of the benefits from this additional control gained by removing some of these variables.
It can also lead to new growing styles such as vertical farming, which brings advantages in terms of space utilisation.
Protected cropping has been a feature of European growing for some time, and Professor Tony Bacic – who leads the La Trobe research hub – believes The Netherlands provides an ideal model for Australia to follow.
“The protected cropping environment has been demonstrated in Europe, particularly in The Netherlands, which is smaller than Tasmania,” Bacic says.
“They’re the second biggest horticultural exporters in the world and they do it all through high tech.
“Clearly they’re geographically closer to markets and Europe’s a big market, but when you think of the land size and what they’ve been able to do with technology, then in my view Australia has huge opportunities to both enhance the yield and the quality and reduce the inputs that we currently have into horticulture.
“We are ideally positioned in Australia to be the exporters of premium quality products into the Asia Pacific market, yet most of our horticultural products are sold domestically.
“There’s also only a very small percentage of Australian horticulture that is grown under protected cropping and most of that is really low-end flexible coverings, so for many crops you’re not getting all the benefits you could from a protected cropping environment.”
Long game
La Trobe’s funding was announced last year and comes from the Australian Research Council, where it was one of seven Industrial Transformation Research Hubs around the country chosen to drive innovation across various industries.
Work started at the beginning of this year, with multiple industry partners, research providers, local and overseas technology partners and Melbourne University’s engineering faculty, faculty, as well as the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, all involved in the wider project.
It is also not a project which will be starting from scratch either, instead widening the scope of work which has been done over the past five years thanks to a previous Australian Research Council ITRH grant, along with industry partner funding and intellectual input.
The previous work had focused on growing medicinal cannabis in a protected cropping environment, with these broad principles and key technology advancements now being applied to horticultural products.
Getting maximum yield from a protected cropping environment was an important part of the research already done.
Additional quality controls were required due to the eventual use of cannabis in medicine which also meant that it could not be sprayed during the growing process like a traditional crop.
The next five years will be about applying this knowledge to horticulture with the aim of expanding protected cropping’s capabilities for that sector in Australia.
“We’ve had a lot of learnings in terms of how to optimise growing a crop and how to speed it up through its cycles. This is another big advantage of protected cropping because you’re not dependent on the climate and you can shorten the crop length so you can increase the rotation times around it,” Bacic says.
“We’ve been looking at how nutrition can lead to better yield and quality, how we can shorten the growth cycle of the plant, how we can speed up the breeding process, looking at new breeding technology so we can measure particular traits.
“It’s every element of that crop that we’re able to work with.”
One of the biggest advances in the sector – as is the case throughout agriculture – has been the opportunities opened up by technology.
La Trobe’s research has brought in a variety of industry partners, including several that are technology focused, which has formed the crux of the research and innovation.
“We’ve been working with the growers of the crop, but also with a lot of the technology companies who are interested in bringing expensive research tools but miniaturising them and making them available to the growers at a much cheaper price,” Bacic says.
“You have these handheld tools now which you can put on robots and we’re testing whether we can fly robots inside glasshouses.
“These advances in robotics are similar to what you see in broadacre crops. Gone are the days that a farmer really has to concentrate on driving the tractor up and down the field – you basically just set the satellite system.
“Those technology developments are happening in the protected cropping space as well – fancy irrigation systems, nutrition delivery systems, detection systems, control systems, so that you can basically predict what’s going to be the outcome of the crop.”
One challenge presented by protected cropping, Bacic says, is the potential for disease loads to become more concentrated.
This is another of the areas which the medicinal cannabis research has explored and where technology has provided a solution that can potentially be applied across the horticultural sector.
“We have these imaging systems where we can actually profile a crop, we can detect if there’s an issue with the health of the crop and in the particular case of medicinal cannabis, we can measure the content of bioactives non-invasively,” Bacic says.
“Because you’ve got to be careful what you use in a medicinal crop, we could allow early detection of symptoms and then people could go and manually pull that plant out of the crop.
“One thing with a protected cropping environment is if you don’t get your environmental conditions right, then disease load can be greater if you’re not careful, so you need to have mechanisms in place for early detection and pull infected plants out of the system.”
Food security
As is the case with most agricultural innovations, the aim is to increase the efficiency of the growing process – allowing more food to be grown at a higher quality with reduced time and cost.
Two major benefits will come from successfully implementing protected cropping on a larger scale in Australian horticulture, Bacic believes, in the form of increased export opportunities and solidifying the nation’s food security.
The Covid pandemic provided a reality check for Australian food security, he adds, with the country dropping to just five days’ worth of fresh food and 14 days’ worth of non-perishable food on the supermarket shelves.
Bacic also believes globalisation, and the ability for diseases to rapidly move around the world, means a pandemic like Covid cannot be viewed as a one-off.
“Although we seem to have long since forgotten it, Covid proved to us that the current international supply chains really need to be revisited and thought about differently,” Bacic says.
“From a sovereign security risk, every country really needs to ensure that it has a security of food supply during that time.
“What we would like to see is a greater focus on food manufacturing in Australia, which we were once very good at – processing and manufacturing – so that we add value to our agricultural outputs, process them, and add value to them for domestic and international markets.
“Because of our regulatory environment, and because we’re seen as a green and clean country, we’re ideally positioned to be a major exporter of quality products into the Asia Pacific region, which is where we should be focusing because that’s the fastest growing region in the world and where there is potential to spend on quality food.”
Overcoming challenges
The next five years of work will have a major head start thanks to applying principles from the medicinal cannabis research and adapting them to horticultural crops such as berries and tomatoes.
Beyond that, the challenge will be converting controlled protected cropping environments, from something conceptual into an option which has large-scale real-world adoption.
Overcoming the threshold of investment required for high-end protected cropping will be the biggest hurdle to overcome, according to Bacic.
“That’s probably the greatest challenge and that’s where I think the government needs to step in to support uptake of the technology because it is initially a significant cost to move to that,” he says.
“It’s going to take a farmer a considerable length of time to get a return on investment, probably not dissimilar to the solar panels on roofs discussion we had, and you can see how that’s been transformed.
“The technology is there though, The Netherlands has proven that – it can be commercialised, it’s scalable.”
Bacic acknowledges that major capital investments such as protected cropping are costly for farmers but believes adjusting the mindset of what horticultural output can achieve will be one way of making it commercially viable.
“I think it probably has to take a mind shift in the Australian market in terms of seeing horticulture not just for domestic supply but as a major export market and that would allow you to scale it at another level than is currently achievable,” he says.
“That would justify the investment that you need to make in the capital to go there.
“You’ve got to look at it as a whole of business. There is a capital cost, but then there’s also a labour-saving cost so you have a very different workforce that’s got to work in those sorts of environments.
“That’s another part of what we’re doing – training up the workforce for the specialisations, but as has happened in broadacre agriculture, the workforce on the farm has reduced significantly with automation.”
While a major research project such as this involves plenty of unknowns, Bacic is confident protected cropping will be a success in the horticultural space – ultimately benefitting the whole nation.
“We believe that the technology is mature enough now and that’s why we’re keen to try and transform the horticultural sector,” he says.
“From a domestic point of view and from a sovereign security point of view, we need security of supply and production and of course we need to be able to export.
“To me it’s about producing nutritious foods for a healthy population.”
To find out more, visit www.latrobe.edu.au/research/lisaf or email lisaf@latrobe.edu.au