Well, welcome to tonight's Provocations public lecture co-hosted by the Royal Society of New South Wales and Charles Sturt University. My name is Michael Friend, pro vice chancellor of research at Charles Sturt University and I'll be your host this evening. 

Now, provocations is a series of public lectures, panel discussions, and blogs written by our prominent thinkers that aim to address some of the major intellectual and social challenges

facing Australia and the world, fostering progress, which can be found at

provocations.csu.edu.au. 

Tonight, distinguished professor Jeff Gurr will address the topic nature-based solutions for future farming. Professor Gurr is an ecologist with a PhD from Imperial College London. He spent over 30 years promoting nature-based solutions that integrate agriculture with the environment. He is recognised amongst Stanford University's world top 2% of scientists. 

Well, thank you Michael for that kind introduction and welcome to this evening's provocations lecture which will be a story in two parts. And I should warn you perhaps that the first part is a little bit dark, a little bit challenging because I'll be setting out the nature of the challenges that we face for future farming. 

Well, to get things underway, I thought we might play a little imagination game. And I'd like you to imagine that it's been a really hectic week. And it's now Friday, in fact, Friday evening, and it's time to breathe a sigh of relief and you flop down on the sofa. You flick on Netflix and are going to relax and enjoy a nice evening watching movies and having some pizza. So, you call out for pizza and it arrives. Delicious smell is wafting out the box. Everyone's looking forward to it. You open the box though and you find something like this, you'd be pretty disappointed. You'd be feeling somewhat let down and anticipating

the family might be not quite as full and satiated as they were hoping. 

Why am I telling you this slightly silly story? Well, the relevance is that in global agriculture, this tells us something about the nature of the challenge that we face. 

So, various studies have been done of course about the impact of pests, whether they're aphids and caterpillars or rabbits and bird pests. But if you sum up the estimates and measured readings on how much yield loss occurs as a result of pest impact in agriculture is about 22%. Important to realize at this point is that that level of loss is despite our best efforts. 

This is not what would happen if we did nothing. This is despite all of our best efforts, modern technology, genetically modified crops, pesticides, which I'll talk a bit more about later, and other sorts of non-chemical options that we bring to bear. This is what's happening at the moment globally. Now, that's a really big problem when you consider the broader context.

Expert commentators on the future of agriculture at a global scale estimate that we need to approximately double levels of production above where we are today. That's partly reflecting increasing population growth of course but also reflecting the fact that we

tend to have dietary preferences including more dairy products and meat products. And so that means you've not only got to grow the food, but you've also got to grow extra food to feed to the livestock animals so you can get the animal products that you desire.

Additionally, we're using a lot of land for growing fibre, cotton, various other fibre crops and, even biofuels these days. So there's a lot of pressure on the available space to try and grow more and more produce including foods and the challenge that we face in

doubling production is that we're pretty close to the maximum capacity of the of

the earth's finite land space. 

In fact, you might be able to make out on the PowerPoint slide here that the amount of land that we're using for growing crops and grazing animals has shot up over the last 100 years or so. And there's very little scope for expansion. All the other good land is already used

mostly for our habitations because we like to live in places that have got rainfall, pleasant climate and fertile soils. So we need to double production but we can't expand productive area any further and so we got to grow more food per unit area. 

And that's why it's such a difficult thing to accept that pests are causing about a fifth of our yields to be lost. 

So, one might think, all righty, let's just use more pesticides. Pesticides work. They're a mature technology. They've been around for ages. Surely, we can just crank up the levels of usage and get rid of all these pesky pests. The problem with that approach is that pesticides don't address the root cause of pest outbreaks. And I'll try to illustrate what I mean by an analogy. 

So imagine you got a headache. It's quite okay to take some aspirin or some paracetamol to address that headache and give you pain relief. And you might perhaps take them for a few days. But if your headache persisted day after day and indeed week after week, I guess most of us would go and see a doctor and just check out what was the underlying cause of our headache. Is it something more sinister that needs to be investigated and treated?

And the problem it then is with pesticides, it's that we apply them to various sorts of crops to cure pest problems. But the pest problems have not come about because of a deficiency in the agricultural system of organo-phosphates or carbonates or synthetic pythroidids. 

The pesticides are not topping up some natural deficiency in the system. So that's what I mean when I say that pesticides are not addressing the root cause. they're addressing the symptom of some deeper underlying issue with the farming system.

So, kind of reflective of that overarching statement I've just made, we need to also consider that pesticides often don't work very well. And the graphic you can see on the slide there is showing just one of many studies that show that whilst pesticides can work, they they're very far from being a panacea or a complete solution to pest problems and a great deal of money can be spent by a farmer in an individual field spraying pesticides but getting no benefit. Pesticides are also hazardous to human health. And the graphic here shows some of the key statistics about lethal and non-lethal poisonings of people by pesticides. 

And this is a really big problem particularly in the global south where safety procedures for farm workers right the way through to food safety are not quite as mature as in more developed countries. And a small somewhat trivial illustration of that is in China where I've spent quite a lot of time myself living in recent years. It's utterly standard that in every kitchen you'd have a bottle of a particular type of detergent and it's there to wash your fruits and vegetables before you chop them up and consume them in the hope that it will rinse off any pesticides that are on the surface of those products. 

So pesticides are hazardous to human health and society and individual consumers are very aware of this. A slightly less apparent and well-known fact about pesticides is that their efficacy is threatened by resistance in pest populations. 

I'll try to illustrate what I mean by this fact by pointing out the brown strip in the photograph you can see which is a rice crop and it was sprayed with an insecticide as a kind of a simple experiment or demonstration. 

So the brown patch where the rice looks as if it's been attacked by a flamethrower was where the pesticide was applied. And far from the pesticide providing control of the target pests, it actually exacerbated their impact. It did that for two reasons. One is that the pesticide killed all the beneficial insects that might otherwise control the pests. But more fundamentally, because those pesticides or those types of pesticides have been repeatedly used year after year after year, the pests have evolved resistance to them. 

They can detoxify the toxins within the pesticide product and so they can just tolerate the pesticide very readily. And that's why you see the brown strip there of very severely damaged rice. 

That is by no means an isolated incident. In fact, the graph here shows some key trends from global statistics about other sorts of pests becoming resistant to other types of pesticides.

Suffice it to say that if we carry on with a uh business as usual model, then the efficacy of pesticides is going to decline markedly even to the point where many of them completely fail to work anymore. 

Pesticides are also damaging to wildlife and one of the more famous books in the field was called Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. It was called Silent Spring because she observed that

in the woodlands of North America where pesticide usage took off very rapidly in the 1960s the woods were silent. There were no song birds to be heard because of the adverse effects of pesticides flowing through the food chain and impacting the song birds. Now that book, Silent Spring, was published in 1962 and it became a very controversial but very influential book in terms of influencing public opinion and government policy and so on. And I think

that most people would tend to assume that agriculture has kind of cleaned up its act and that surely nowadays pesticide use is far less than it used to be back in the 60s and surely everything's okay, isn't it? 

Well, unfortunately, if you look at these statistics, and we're looking here at importation and production of pesticides for the reason that it's very hard to get accurate global statistics on actual usage because it's a very granular phenomenon, you know, in how much was applied to each of the millions of fields each year. It's hard to monitor that. But production and imports are much more regulated and good data available. 

And you can see then that since the 1960s when that famous book appeared the levels of pesticide related activity have shot up quite dramatically.

So coming back to this question of surely the solutions for future agriculture rely in just using more insecticides, more pesticides. The two-fold reason we can't do that are first of all they're not addressing the underlying causes of pest outbreaks. And secondly, if we do continue to use them, there are lots and lots of hazards that we need to be mindful of that can erode their efficacy and their social license. Despite those factors, it does rather seem as if many agricultural systems around the world are hooked so to speak on pesticide use.

So returning to this bigger picture challenge of how we can increase food production on a finite land area, it could perhaps lead one to feel quite depressed about the outlook and wondering just what the pathway is to a a more sustainable future for agriculture.

Everything so far has been quite grim, certainly quite challenging. But I hope here is where we pivot and I'll try and show you some of the solutions that my group at Charles Sturt University working with international colleagues the approaches that we're developing to try and provide a more sustainable pathway. 

But what I'd like to do is now play a second little imagination game. Perhaps one that would be a little bit soothing to you after being assaulted by all those negative statistics and trends that I've just relayed to you. 

So try to imagine a natural landscape. It doesn't matter where it is. It could be in the tropics. It could be in a temperate area. It could be a tropical rainforest or a woodland or some kind of grassland system. But in your mind's eye, just try to picture this landscape. And I'll ask you one question about what you're seeing. 

What is the dominant colour in your mind's eye at the moment? What colour is dominant in this natural landscape?

Well, just possibly it's this colour here, green. And as your imagination crystallizes a little bit and you see things a bit more clearly, you might start to make out some individual plants and then perhaps some structures of plants like tree trunks.

And as you zoom out in your mind's eye, you might see a landscape that looks a little bit like this with multiple shades of this colour green. And indeed, if you were to really zoom out and take a kind of satellite view of the Earth's surface, it would be apparent to you that the land area is characterised by being green.

And if you think about this, it's a fact that we take utterly for granted. We never stop to think about why it's why it's green and how that greenness can be persisting so long over time and over such very large areas of the land. 

And that same mystery has occupied the minds of ecologists for quite some time. And it's sometimes referred to as the green world hypothesis. And the thinking behind this is essentially that well all this greenery that we see around us when we go to any natural area. Well that's plant tissue. It's salad and better than salad maybe really super nutritious plant

materials and it's just sitting there, right? Just sitting there inviting a herbivore, maybe an antelope or a caterpillar or a beetle to munch away on it and consume it. And yet somehow season after season over catchment to catchment, greenery persists. 

So how is that so given it's just sitting there waiting to be eaten? After all, plants can't uproot literally and flee when they're being approached by a herbivore. They've just got to sit there and take it. Well, in fact, the reasons for the world being so dominated by the colour green, reflective of plants growing almost everywhere where there's fertility on water, is twofold. And the first is that plants have really powerful friends to help them to persist and withstand the attacks of herbivores. And the second reason is that whilst

plants might look really innocent, benign, perhaps even vulnerable, they're surprisingly well defended. And what I'll do over the next few slides is unpack those two very broad-brush statements and try to illustrate them for you. 

And this will explain why the world remains green. And it just might be that we can borrow some of the lessons from the biology of these systems and apply them into our into our agricultural systems to make them more sustainable.

So this leads us into the whole idea of trying to harness nature based solutions for future farming. And the work that I'll be showing you in the next several slides has been done largely by my group at Charles Sturt Uni. But the point I want to reinforce here is that it's been a truly collaborative venture with partners all around the world because the challenges that we're dealing with tonight are truly global. They affect all agricultural areas in every continent.

And so there are teams around the world where my group has engaged found a common interest in these nature-based solutions and in some instances at least had a few wins. 

So let's dive into this. The first of those reasons that I asserted account for the fact the world remains green are that plants have powerful friends. And what I mean by that are things like the animals that you see pictured here. And the top one is a fairly familiar type of insect, a

preying mantis. And you see one chomping away on a fly here. But the insect on the lower part of the screen is a much less familiar one. And I'm referring here to the wasp which

is caught in action here. 

And she is inserting her stinger or ovipositor as it's more properly known into this unfortunate weevil pest. And she's inserting the opposite through the pest's anus because it's so heavily armoured with its exoskeleton that the anus and the mouth are the only

orifices through which she can insert her of ovipositor. Very gruesome but rather useful to us with an interest in controlling pests naturally because the eggs of the wasp will then hatch inside the insect and eat away at the body contents of the host and as they complete their feeding phase and mature they'll then punch their way out through the exoskeleton of the weevil, emerge as a wasp and then complete the life cycle again and again. 

So, anybody out there listening who, like me, is a big fan of sci-fi movies and enjoys

things like the Alien series, nature got to that sort of gruesome life cycle way before Hollywood thought about using it to speculate about how certain types of alien creatures from other planets might attack spacemen and deposit their eggs inside spacemen only to have them mature as uh chest busters and then go forth to rampage through the space station or spaceship causing mayhem. 

This is very much a case of art following in the course of nature. So they're the powerful friends that I think are in part responsible for our green world.

But the problem is that those powerful friends that plants in natural systems are reliant upon as bodyguards if you like, they need food sources. 

So another example is this creature here. It's called a hoverfly. And this one here is taking pollen from a plant. And pollen's a very rich source of protein without which these female

insects can't mature their ovaries and produce eggs. And that's a shame because they're very useful insects. Apart from the adults being very effective pollinators, the grubs or the larvi of this type of insect which resemble a maggot, they crawl over plant surfaces and they'll consume various sorts of pests like aphids and small caterpillars very voraciously. 

They're extremely effective control agents for many pests. But in the absence of suitable plants from which they can obtain the pollen, then their population density will decline.

And that's a really big problem. If we start to focus away now from natural systems into agricultural systems because in agriculture unlike nature we tend to grow crops in a monoculture. It's just wall-to-wall rice plants or apples or cotton whatever. We don't have very much in the way of other plant species growing there simultaneously.

And indeed if we did we'd spray them with herbicides, weed killers to try and control them. And so that means that in a field setting like the one you see pictured here, there are zero opportunities for the types of insects that I've been talking about, the beneficial ones that control pests, to obtain these complimentary foods that they require for their successful life cycle.

This now will transition into a brief account of how we can take this natural effect and change the farming system to make it rather more friendly towards these beneficial insects. 

Even a very modest a very easy change to farming practices can make a big difference. 

For example, in rice fields, rather than having a monoculture, we could potentially grow a secondary crop. And this one here happens to be okra or ladies fingers, which also provides nectar and uh, pollen, the sorts of foods that beneficial insects require. You can grow that on the bund on the earthen bank at the side of each rice field and the farmer can harvest that as a secondary crop. 

But more importantly from our perspective in controlling pests. It's providing shelter and foods that can attract and promote the activity of beneficial insects that then will control the pests that are trying to damage the crop. Now, you may be asking if what I'm talking about here is just a theory or tree hugger kind of greenwash or if there's any hard evidence that it can actually work. 

So, I'll just show you a few slides from a big experiment on Asian rice that I helped lead a number of years ago. This is probably the biggest experiment that I've ever been involved in. And we worked with farmer groups in China and in Thailand and Vietnam and the local agricultural agencies and research groups to develop a system whereby locally appropriate crops were selected in a sort of farmer participatory co-design process and those plants were then added to what would otherwise have been a monoculture of rice. And we are testing whether that made a difference to the activity of beneficial insects and maybe helped to check the outbreaks of pests.

And in this study there were 16 separate sites. The sites were in the ground for four years and as I mentioned this took place across three countries. So, this was a seriously big experiment.

And what we found was that having these plants that do produce flowers for much

of the season attracted lots and lots of beneficial insects and these had a big effect on the pests such that they are more heavily parasitised by little wasps like the one you see pictured here on this slide. So we have an effect in relation to parasitism rates increasing and as you might imagine that translated over time into massive reductions in the numbers

of pests in the crop itself.

Now these trial sites that I've been describing were on commercial farms and we asked the farmers to just take normal pest control action as they see fit from day to day. We didn't tell them you cannot spray but of their own evaluation through observing lower numbers of pests. 

On average, the farmers sprayed only once per season on the sites where the flowering plants were being grown. And that was a massive reduction compared to more than three times per season on average for the control areas where just standard farming practice was used and the rice was grown as a monoculture with no flowering plants.

In addition to all that, when we got to the end of each season and those crops were harvested and the yields were measured, there was a very significant increase in the grain yield of the rice crop itself. And so we're getting a really big advantage here. We're getting fewer pests and therefore less need to apply pesticides. So we're making cost savings. We're also getting a higher yield from our primary crop. And incidentally, the farmers could then harvest the secondary crop, the ones that had produced flowers earlier in the season, and attain a dual income from those. 

In fact, when the economic modelling was done, it showed that for farmers who switched

to this diversified system, including flowering plants, they had a 7.5% economic advantage over standard practice. And this piece of work was the easiest one that I've ever encountered in my many agricultural related projects. the easiest one to then persuade farmers to implement because word got out and the technology or the approach snowballed such that farmers from neighbouring areas were just taking this method and running with it with very little need for extension activity or communication activity to promote the idea. 

It's now being used by literally tens of thousands of growers across Asia and in fact in China it's now recommended policy by Beijing and the policy documents say to farmers this is the best way to grow rice no longer as a monoculture but as a diversified system with flowering plants. 

Some follow-up work after that big experiment that I've just described was a European Union funded project called Legato and it took a far wider view than the earlier project, wider than just benefits for pest control and economics, and it showed that in areas where groups of farmers started to adopt these more diversified and nature-based approaches for growing rice. They enjoyed the benefits from a number of additional ecosystem services. 

Things like soil fertility increased largely as a consequence of increased activity of detritivores. Detritivores is just a fancy name for the small animals that live in the soil like earthworms and springtails that break down crop residues at the end of the season and release the nutrients in the soil. 

So the following crop whether it's another rice crop or wheat or vegetables they have lots of nutrients available for their growth.

Regional pollinator assemblages were also increased and of course whilst rice isn't an insect pollinated crop many of the other crops that grow in these rice production areas are insect pollinated and so having increased densities of pollinators in the system were strongly beneficial.

Wildlife conservation was also enhanced as were aspects of cultural heritage and leisure amenity value. 

So let's come back home. Let's talk about Australia and whether these methods that appear to have such promise in Asia can have a role here. 

Well, I'm happy to report that the situation is looking very favourable in part because industry or industries in Australia are very forward-looking and mindful that a business as usual model is probably not the best way to go to embrace sustainability and public license. 

So my research group has enjoyed very significant funding over the years from organisations like Wine Australia, from Horts Innovation and from the Cotton Catchment Communities Cooperative Research Centre to take a closer look at those commodities that each of those organisations looks after, cotton, vegetables, vineyards, and to look at pest control and NATO based solutions more generally and develop strategies that can be rolled out in

Australia to make those industry sectors more sustainable and we've enjoyed very significant levels of success.

Okay, at this point I'd like to now move on and talk about the second of the major reasons why we have a green earth. Why there's so much plant material out there not being consumed by pests and this reason relates to plant defences. 

So plant are sessile. They're rooted to the spot quite literally. They cannot flee to escape pest pressure. They have to somehow counter it by other means. And probably the most familiar example of this type of phenomenon is the spines on a cactus. And you can imagine that a camel or a goat approaching a cactus like this one would find that somewhat challenging as lunch. But whilst that's a very familiar case of plant defences, most plants don't have those sorts of very conspicuous thorny spines. 

So, how do they protect themselves from pests?

Well, it's very much more than just about spines. And the graphics that you see beside the photograph of the cactus are something a little bit similar but on a microscopic proportion. 

These structures which look kind of like a science fictional landscape are called glandular tricoms. They're tiny hairs usually no more than a millimetre high often much smaller

than a millimetre. But the special thing about these glandular tricoms is the head that you can perhaps make out on the tip of each of the spines. And the plant packs its own self-made insecticides into those tips. So that when an insect walks over the plant surface or tries to eat the plant, it ruptures the membrane that surrounds each of those globules and releases this compound with great precision exactly when and exactly where necessary to

deter the activity of that attacking pest. 

And this very brief video clip that I'll show you here illustrates that effect with an aphid walking over the surface of a plant which has very dense tricoms and as it's blundering its

way across it's bumping unavoidably into these tricoms rupturing the head and becoming exposed to the contents which are strongly irritant in nature.

But moreover, when they are in contact with atmospheric oxygen, they'll oxidise and produce effectively a glue which will then anchor that insect to the plant surface, even cover its mouth parts, and certainly arrest any feeding activity. So that's just one very nice example of how plants have over the millions of years of attack by insects and other sorts of herbivores evolve some really crafty defence mechanisms.

The second strategy that I'll show you by which plants can defend themselves in ways that are not really obvious to us humans is even more amazing because plants can also cry for

help when they're being attacked. And this plant you can see on the slide here, you may be able to make out a caterpillar that's consuming a leaf. And the plant is able within an hour to turn on metabolic pathways that will generate volatile chemicals. And these chemicals will waft away from the plant. And the really cool thing about this mechanism is that the beneficial insects that I was speaking about earlier, including parasitic wasps, have evolved

the capacity to detect these volatile chemicals. 

And they'll follow the odour stream upwind and find the plant because they know they can associate that odour with a particular type of pest and they'll know it's one that they need. 

For their prey or for the hosts to parasitise and complete their life cycle. So those volatile chemicals I'm talking about are known by the slightly complex term herbivore induced plant volatiles HIPPVs but essentially the plant using a chemical language not the sort of language that we use but a chemical language to cry for help and recruit bodyguards that can come and attack the pests that are feeding on them.

And the wonderful way that we can exploit that natural phenomenon that happens, you know, quite naturally in rainforests and grasslands and hedros naturally, we can make this work in our crop systems by some quite simple techniques and one of them is by topping up the amount of silicon available to plants. 

Now going back a generation or so plant scientists would have poo pooed the idea that plants need silicon. But in fact many plants including in crop systems are deficient in silicon. 

And if we can make this available in particular environmentally chemical formulations, plants can take this up in their roots.

And the effect of it is that it amplifies this cry for help that I just described. It changes the blend of chemicals in the HIPPVs, these chemical cues, and makes them even more attractive to beneficial insects. And we've shown this in a few different cases, including

rice. And this particular study was a cucumber example where we found that this very

charismatic predator called a red and blue beetle was much more strongly attracted to pest infested plants when the silicon fertilisation to those plants had previously been topped up.

A second technique that we can use very practically in agriculture to exploit this chemical defence mechanism that I'm describing is to spray plants with synthetic versions of HIPPVs.

Now, these chemicals are naturally occurring, but fortunately for us, we can make them in the laboratory, and they're very inexpensive. And remarkably, those very same chemicals

are also used extremely widely in the food and beverage industry to provide flavours for confectionary and so on. 

So, they're extremely safe both in terms of the environment and for the consumer. But the cool thing is that when you apply these synthetic HIPPVs to a plant, it activates the plant's own chemistry and leads it to produce its own indogenous blend of HIPPVs and then send this out to attract beneficial insects. But as you can perhaps imagine, this capacity to turn

that mechanism on by the application of a synthetic HIPP gives us the capacity as a as a grower to respond to the early signs of a pest outbreak by spraying not a conventional synthetic and potentially harmful pesticide, but by spraying a synthetic HIPPV and using this as a way to get the plant to turn on its natural defence mechanisms. 

And in the graphic you can see on the slide here, it just shows that for various types of synthetic HIPP, the consequences of this can be a reduction in the numbers of caterpillar pests, in this case Heliothus moth caterpillars.

It goes further in terms of the practical relevance of this method and you can walk into the aisles of your favourite hardware store. I won't mention the name of the hardware chain, but it's one where you can famously get a sausage in bread on the way in or you can jump online to um look for this product. It was developed by the company that worked with us on that earlier work that I spoke of using synthetic HIPPVs and they've commercialised this in the form of something called eco oil. 

Their marketing department wasn't crazy about that rather complicated term that I mentioned before HIPPV herbivore induced plant volatiles. They thought well how can we sell this to the average consumer? So they turned it around a little bit and they use Hippo, which stands for herbivore induced plant protection odour. And the idea of this product, which contains synthetic HIPVs and a natural plant-based oil, is that you can spray it onto a crop, whether in your home garden or in a horticultural commercial context. Spray it onto your crop at the first signs of a pest outbreak and it'll recruit beneficial insects that will nip that infestation in the bud.

So we come to the conclusion now of the lecture and I just want to make a few points to reinforce the major theme of what I'm talking about here which is one of optimism because

if we think about the natural world being green and not being chomped away by numerous herbivores It's because plants have amazing defence mechanisms and those plants have also got powerful friends in the form of beneficial insects. 

And here's the great thing. We can exploit those phenomena to develop alternatives to hazardous pesticides. And in this brief lecture tonight, I've just had a chance to illustrate a couple of examples of how we're making extremely tangible headway in that challenge. And switching to these nature-based solutions really works. I showed you with that Asian rice example how we got fewer pests and higher yields, we lowered production costs and we increased profits. 

And so farmers were very happy with that. But whilst farmers are concerned about pests, that's far from the only problem on their radar screen. Farmers are busy people with many other imperatives or many other concerns. 

But the nice thing is that we can look to nature-based solutions and get additional benefits like increased pollinators, more nutrient cycling and even conserving wildlife on

farmlands. So essentially then future farming has a number of major challenges before it. 

But I think that nature provides lots of ideas that we can harness and bring to bear to provide some effective solutions. So just in conclusion for tonight I'd like to briefly acknowledge the many funding organisations that have supported the work of myself and my collaborators and with a final plug that the work continues and if you would

like to be a part of that future work by joining us as a PhD scholar then please contact me and discuss your potential eligibility for a domestic PhD scholarship. 

We've got time uh for some questions. 

So to start off given the challenges, why do we see pesticides still so widely used given the hazards?

Yeah, I think the answer to that question of why pesticides remain so widely used is a complex one inevitably.

It's partly because they are a solution to an extent to pest problems that is easy to patent and market and these large companies that sell them have got very large marketing departments. 

So they're able to keep this potential solution very much in the front of mind for growers as a solution.

And I guess the second part of the jigsaw puzzle is that unfortunately human beings like simple answers. And if we go to the doctors with a certain ailment, we want to walk out of there with a script for a medicine we can take and it's cured. 

We don't want to hear about lifestyle choices, changing our diet, getting exercises, and giving up doing the things that we love like consume red wine. 

I think pesticides are responding to that human quirk of wanting a supposedly quick

fix to a complex solution. 

It's a wicked problem, that we do seem to be obsessed with quick fixes.

So, what do you see as some of the major constraints to the development adoption of biological control alternatives or approaches? 

There are there are three broad approaches to biological control. 

One is to look overseas where the pest originated from and import it into the country where the pest is running a mock and that has been stunningly successful in a very few cases.

One reason it's not used more widely is because um the ecological risk of bringing in a pest that would be a case of the cure is worse than the original disease. And for us Aussies

here in Australia, the cane toad is a famous example of that. And the cane toad is a far bigger problem than the cane beetles. It was brought into control. So that importation approach has got risks. 

The second major approach of biological control is to rear them up in massive laboratories and I've seen some of these around the world and some of them are incredibly extensive. 

They produce millions of insects a week. The problem with that is it's costly. Typically releasing biological control agents is about 10 times more expensive than spraying an insecticide. 

The third approach, however, is what I've devoted the last 20 years to, and it's saying effectively, let's make the very best possible use of the beneficial insects that are there already. Let's try and alter the farming system with some subtle tweaks to make it more benign to their survival, attract them into the crops, and let them control the pest a system like that. And in fact the product that I try to mention without it sounding like a commercial interlude in the presentation is quite widely used in fruit and nut trees commercially.

So will the types of biological controls you've described potentially impact on other aven and mammalian species?

There's extra need for stringency in the specificity and safety testing there. 

What are the next crops or commodities that you plan to work on? 

We'll be working on wheat and tomatoes with Western Sydney University and a relatively newly started project here at Charles Sturt University is working with sesame which is an emerging industry in Australia and we're quite optimistic about starting that industry without it carrying an inherent need to be sprayed all the time. 

We're trying to understand the biocontrol agents that might make it a crop we can grow

with minimal pesticide inputs. 

Jane Quinn. Good evening everyone.