Alumni

It was around 2007 when Professor Graeme Martin, from UWA’s Institute of Agriculture and School of Agriculture and Environment, began to seriously think about tackling a topic he’d been teaching about population growth and the difficulties it would cause in the not-too-distant future.

“I had a 40 year career investigating brain function in sheep, with PhD graduates and friends all over the world; a really fabulous career,” Professor Martin says.

“Then I sort of decided that, if I discovered one more molecule or one more cell in the brain of a sheep, it wasn’t going to save the planet.”

So he decided to do something about it by turning UWA into a leader in future-proofing agricultural research. Using funds procured through the sale of a rural property previously owned by UWA, a new 1600-hectare farm was purchased near the Wheatbelt town of Pingelly, Western Australia. ‘Ridgefield’ is where the UWA Future Farm 2050 project is reimagining our land use and challenging established knowledge.

“It’s big picture thinking,” explains Graeme. “We set out to imagine the perfect farm for this part of the world for 2050, when there will be 50 percent more people to feed and clothe, and then began transforming the farm to meet that vision.”

With a firm foundation in agriculture for food production, the project’s mission is multidisciplinary, bringing together four areas of activity.

“With livestock we follow a clean, green and ethical concept, where clean means less hormones and drugs, green means ecosystem care, and ethical means animal welfare,” Professor Martin explains. “That adds an overall flavour to the enterprise.”

The project takes a similar approach to its best-practice ecological cropping and efforts to restore the ecosystem and regain the property’s lost biodiversity by putting the bush back into cleared areas that are unfit for crops or livestock. All this while still functioning as a working farm turning a profit.

“It had to be a business,” says Graeme. “If it’s not profitable, no one is going to follow the model. We have to have credibility out there.”

The fourth area of focus is people. It’s an important part of the project’s vision to help promote thriving farmers living in vibrant communities with social activity, busy schools and a healthy local economy.

“Interestingly, that’s one of the first things that really took off in the project,” explains Professor Martin. “We have a strong relationship with Pingelly township, and the local aboriginal community have recently embraced us. Pingelly now calls itself a ‘university town’, which is just amazing, really.”

It’s the project’s multidisciplinary nature that led to it winning the Alumni Fund People’s Choice Award. Through the Fund, alumni support initiatives designed to enrich the student experience. The Future Farm will use the grant to renovate Ridgefield’s old farmhouse and provide accommodation for groups of students and teachers to stay on the farm and gain first-hand experience of the exciting work happening there.

“We’ve got hard-core experts in agriculture, in soils, plants, animals, economics, and, on top of that, people keen on agricultural engineering, architecture, social work and population health. All of these people are involved in one way or another in what is a big, broad project,” says Graeme.

“The UWA Future Farm 2050 project is by far the most exciting thing I’ve ever done, because it’s about the future of humanity.”