Drought Resilience
Drought and climate change are the biggest threats to our food system.
In the coming years the weather on our planet will become more extreme and much harder to predict. Drought will take hold in new areas of the world. It will grip others more strongly, and for much longer.
To continue feeding a growing population, the world must find new solutions to produce food and fibre during drought.
And as the driest inhabitable continent on Earth, we believe that these solutions can come from Australia.
How Australia lives with drought is a lesson for the world.
Drought is part of Australia’s history.
Oral knowledge of drought has been passed down through Indigenous communities over thousands of years. Scientists are still learning about megadroughts in the 1760s and 1830s. And brutal stories of loss from the Federation Drought, the World War II Drought, and the Millenium Drought run deep in the national psyche.
But underneath the heartache and pain, there is another story of innovation and resilience.
For every millilitre of water, Australian farmers are producing 300% more grain than they did a century ago.
In the driest growing conditions on the planet, the national industry produces three times more food than the country consumes.
Every success story shows how streams of Australian ingenuity can come together, like advancements in crop genetics, innovation in water management, and wholesale changes of farming systems.
While the rest of the world must begin preparing for a future of more extreme, less predictable weather, Australia has already invested in a foundation of resilience.
While drought is often rightly seen as a crisis, for Australia, it is also our opportunity.
A step change is needed to export Australian drought expertise.
Australian ingenuity in drought-resilient agriculture has already produced many successful, global agtech startups.
ClimateCorp was the first major exit in global agtech after it sold to Monsanto for $1B in 2013.
IoT innovation led Observant to partner with Indian giant agri-corporate, Jain Irrigation in 2017.
Loam Bio and ReGrow are part of new wave of startups helping farmers and the supply chain shore up climate resilience. They have raised huge sums of funding, and put Australian tech and agricultural expertise on a global stage.
But the success of a small number of companies hides an important reality: compared to other developed countries, Australia does not excel in the commercialisation of research.
More than $2.2B is spent every year on world-class agricultural research, yet only $316m was invested in early-stage agrifood companies in 2022. This is a fraction of the investment poured into the category by neighbours across the Asia-Pacific.
And organisations in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom have two to three times the number of invention disclosures and startups per billion dollars spent on research.
This gap between potential and realisation is where opportunities to be truly world leading are lost.
Australia can build the next wave of world-leading companies in drought resilience.
Australia's natural adversity makes us a hotbed for innovation. A future world with longer, more intense periods of drought will be the source pain and hardship for farmers.
But it creates an opportunity for our researchers and industry experts to share their knowledge with the world. Australia can set a new global standard in drought-resilient agriculture.
With new models for commercialising our research, a future generation of agtech startups can take our hard-won expertise to the world.
