Lumen Waite 100 - Flipbook - Page 44
Ehsan and his peers carry our future on
their shoulders through their research. “My
real interest is to come up with technology
that can be adopted by farmers to improve
their productivity, sustainability, and eventually impact the Australian economy,” he says.
“A back-of-an-envelope calculation shows
that every year, across the northern, southern
and western part of the country, we lose about
$3.4 billion by not unlocking the potential
that remains in soil.”
Fortunately, the brains trust at Waite
is powerful.
“I’ve been exposed to some of the best
scientists and academics that you can wish
for,” Ehsan says. “One of the people that really changed my life was Associate Professor
Glenn McDonald, a plant scientist who still
works here.”
To Ehsan, no work could be more important. “When you think about agricultural
soils in Australia, more than 75 per cent of
our soils are suffering from one, or more than
one problem,” he says. “Approximately 98.8
per cent of our food comes directly from soil.
That is significant.”
Professor Michael McLaughlin researches
soil and environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology, risk assessment, food quality, crop nutrition and fertiliser technology. He also travelled to Australia to complete his PhD, after
studying in his homeland of Ireland, and in
the UK and South Africa.
Another source of inspiration was Professor Peter Anderson, a chemist who applied his
knowledge of chemistry to the environment.
“I came to Australia because of Waite’s
reputation in soil science,” he says. “I did
my PhD at Waite and worked for CSIRO for
many years, before joining the University in
2004. I’ve worked a lot on soil contamination
by heavy metals, how they get into soil and
trying to come up with environmental regulations to safely use fertilisers on soil.”
“There’s a lot of rapid changes in chemistry, and chemical engineering in bacterial science,” Ehsan says. “Agriculture
is often really traditional, but the innovation here is to adopt the latest advances in
nanotechnology and the latest advances
in chemical engineering, to come up with innovation for agriculture.”
Michael describes himself as a soil chemist. “I’ve used chemistry in both the contamination areas and the soil fertility area,” he
says. “More recently, it’s almost verging into
engineering, where we got into a relationship
with a major multinational fertiliser company [Mosaic] in 2004. Since then, we’ve been
helping them develop new products to reduce
44
environmental losses of nutrients to waterways or to the air, and to improve crop recovery of nutrients that we apply to the land.”
In a research career spanning more than
four decades, Michael has seen it all. He says
the advent of modern instrumentation has
totally transformed the way soil science research is conducted. He describes the global
“mood shift” as heartening.
“Particularly in the last five years, the World
Health Organization Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO) have really done a lot
to improve the understanding of the importance of soils,” Michael says. “Social media
is helping to educate a lot of people in cities
about the importance of soil science, through
LinkedIn, X, and Facebook, and in Australia
we’ve been really lucky to have a national soils
advocate, set up by the government.
“The Soil Science Society has really engaged with the National Soils Initiative, and
through those new communication channels,
I think a lot more people in urban areas now
understand about soil.”
Forward thinking is also a major part of
Research Fellow Dr Thomas Lines’ work.
Thomas is currently focusing on the complex
interactions between under-vine cover crops,
soil health and perennial horticulture crops.
