It is super important that farming is sustainable but also productive. At the end of the day, farmers are feeding the world. So, if farmers are farming better then we're better.

I'm Zoe Starkey and I coordinate the SA Discovery Farms program. The SA Discovery Farms program was built on the back of farmer challenges. Farming’s really a risk management operation. You've got to do well in the good years and then manage your risks and get through in the poorer years. And this project is really aimed at those poorer years.

Hi, I'm Craig Liddicoat, I’m research fellow in restoration genomics at Flinders University.

There's a bunch of big picture global issues that are feeding down onto farmers in terms of supplying healthy food. Underneath all that you’re relying on healthy soils to produce healthy food and keep the system going.

The program’s led by Flinders University in collaboration with SARDI. To grow a crop like the one here. We need to not only be able to establish that crop, but that what that crop is growing in is obviously the soil.

We're looking at the biology within that soil to grow a better plant. We're actually trying to feed the soil and have the plants interact in a more resilient way during dry times.

If we find something that works, it's about scaling that back and then making it practical for farmers. There's living biological communities in our soils and in our guts. A lot of them we can't see easily or detect or identify or work out what they're doing.

So we use DNA based tools to survey who's there and what they can do. Partnering with SARDI, the particular aspect that we're involved with is looking at if we can try different treatments and amendments to try and boost the soil microbiome.

The main goals of the project are to try and build drought resilience. The weather conditions have certainly changed the way we've done things. Being a low rainfall zone with having to get crops up a little rain. I've been farming for now near 20 years. We need to adapt, but probably changing our practices and to try and get in early and get stuff up and away in the shorter seasons.

Soil health is impacting us, the more we've improved it, the more moisture it's been able to retain. And we’ve certainly been growing crops when we've had late rainfall, we've been able to benefit from the nutrients that are still in the soil for us.

There is a constant evolution of new tools that that can be used in farming. And I guess soil biology is kind of the next iteration. I think there will be a shift more towards harnessing the biology and letting the biology work for free.

Farming is getting better, and research has enabled that. It's important that we can continue to invest in research, but also collaborate with research and get that known and extended out to farmers. I'm excited to see where research is going to take us in the future for farming, particularly around the biology of soils.

And the more that we know about the soil, the more farmers know about soils and how to look after that space.