University of Melbourne Professor Tim Reeves knows how to feed the world without wrecking the planet.
This research, combined with his achievements as the former director-general of the international wheat research institute CIMMYT, has been recognised in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.
A godfather of no-till cropping, Prof Reeves, 77, has been made a Member in the General Division (AM) for his service to sustainable agricultural production and research.
"To get this recognition is really the icing on the cake as I have enjoyed everything I have done," Prof Reeves said.
"The most exciting times in my career have been working on new technology to help make farmers simultaneously more productive, profitable, and sustainable.
"That's the challenge, to answer how can we feed the world and not wreck the planet."
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After immigrating from England with his wife Pat, Prof Reeves spent 25 years at the Rutherglen Research Institute where he pioneered no-till conservation research, before becoming the RRI director in 1981.
Despite the traditional resistance to no-till farming, Prof Reeves said he had some farming friends as early adopters, and during an "extremely wet" 1973 was when no-till farming took off.
"I worked side by side with farmers very early on and convinced some friends of mine to try it out," he said.
"Their father said 'it won't work' but he let the boys go and it was one of the only crops that was successfully planted and harvested that year in North East Victoria when most farmers couldn't even get a tractor on a bare paddock."
Prof Reeves left Rutherglen in 1992 to become the University of Adelaide's foundation professor of sustainable agricultural production.
But he said the pinnacle of his career was at CIMMYT in Mexico, as the only Australian to head the world's premier wheat research institute.
He worked with more than 100 developing countries and focused the institute on "sustainable maize and wheat systems for the resource-poor".
"Bringing that sustainable focus to the great work of CIMMYT was something I am proud of," he said.
"Bringing in that need for sustainability was not just about higher-yielding wheat and maize varieties, but they needed to be produced in sustainable systems that look at soil health and input efficiencies. ,
"We introduced a project of stress-tolerant maize to Africa, looking at the insect-resistant varieties that could thrive in those poor farmers' conditions without fertiliser, tolerant of heat and drought. "
In 2002 he returned to Australia before taking on a role with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations Federation, where he lead research into the sustainable intensification of agriculture.
"It is all about ultimately increasing agriculture's productivity to feed a rapidly growing world population at the same time enhancing the world's ecosystem health," Prof Reeves said.
He was the lead author on FOA's Save and Grow, and Grow in Practice, published across the globe in 2011 and 2016 respectively.
"It's about saving the planet while growing more food," he said.
"For the Australian farmers, the practices of sustainable intensification are about more diverse systems, better soil health, better water use efficiencies, integrated pest management and not just reliance on pesticides and using the best genetic materials in those systems.
"Each one adds values and the combination holds is greater than the sum of parts."
Prof Reeves said the concept of "sustainable intensification" involved simultaneous increases in agricultural productivity and ecosystem health.
"Clearly, business-as-usual will not be acceptable and the world is now looking to the sustainable intensification of agri-food systems to produce more with less," he said.
"To nourish a global population still growing, our current and future agri-food systems must provide more nutritious food from less land, less energy-rich inputs, less greenhouse gas emissions and all of this under the spectre of the multiplier effects of climate change."
Australian farming systems need to be more diverse and resilient, he said, and soil nitrogen and carbon levels need to be rebuilt.
He challenged attendees at a Grains Research and Development Corporation forum in Wagga Wagga, NSW, and said the canola-wheat rotation which dominated cropping farms was high-risk and unsustainable.
"Research has shown fertiliser nitrogen usage can be reduced by the use of more biologically fixed nitrogen from pasture legumes and pulses," he said.
The advantage of pasture rotations, he said, was to help rebuild soil carbon and in doing so sequester carbon dioxide.
Australia's dependency on nitrogen-based fertilisers and nitrogen losses from fertilisers were a major burden on the industry.
During the 1960s, he said, a rule-of-thumb was that for every kilogram per hectare of nitrogen applied as fertiliser, about 19 to 20kg/ha was supplied from pasture as biologically fixed nitrogen, and now, that ratio was about 4:1.
"That is a huge change but is that where we want to be in a risky climate and marketplace?" he said.
"I was telling them stuff they didn't want to hear but I had eight young farmers not wanting to farm how they were but scared of their financial viability if they changed.
"We must have more diverse systems and go back to a more mixed system, increase pasture from livestock and diversify incomes and help rebuild soil health."
Prof Reeves has helped develop a new agronomy subject at the University of Melbourne based on sustainable intensification, as he believed the grains industry was at a critical decision point.
"Sustainable intensification is the sensible scientific pathway to building more efficient and diverse systems to help rebuild soil carbon and nitrogen levels," he said.
"The greatest incentive to improve soil carbon is the economic impact on farming - the inputs use efficiency, crop yield and pasture and livestock production are very compelling.
"Farmers will need to look at accruing carbon credits on their farm because sooner or later, farmers will be asked to offset carbon emissions from their farm, from their use of fertiliser or livestock."
Implementation of sustainable intensification could involve adding a pulse to the system, using a brown manure crop or growing a double break, he said.
The next step would be to add a pasture legume and livestock into the system, he said, and incorporate perennials to take advantage of summer rain.
Innovative use of stock containment facilities could be one means of getting livestock back onto all-cropping farms, while steadily replacing fences and the other infrastructure necessary for a return to rotational farming.
"This would then allow the re-establishment of legume based pastures one paddock at a time but with the bonus of income diversification and risk reduction from the outset," Prof Reeves said.
"Well-structured soil facilitates improved nutrient cycling and water holding capacity, which in turn results in a more resilient system for crops and livestock. We need to develop our soils so they can store summer rainfall.
"Compaction is also an issue on many farms, as is acidity, and if we don't address these now they may become too costly to remediate down the track."