Give me a campus among the gum trees

Christ Hatzis
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis. Let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

In this episode, we head to Dookie, the University of Melbourne’s regional campus in the north-east of Victoria. The winery at Dookie dates back to 1896, and the traditional custodians of the land are the Yorta Yorta peoples, and, to the south of the campus, the Tuanwurrung peoples.

We speak to academics and animal breeders about how their research is changing the future of farming, improving not just our impact on the environment, but also producing richer and better produce, higher yields and more sustainable farming practices. We took a road trip on a very special day for the campus - it’s “Dookie Day” – the agricultural campuses’ open day where prospective students and locals can come and see all the exciting research and developments that take place there. There’s an opportunity to taste the farm’s produce from meat to merlot, beef to beer, and those super trendy microgreens that are all the rage.

Hear that sizzling? It’s not your average sausage sizzle or barbeque. It’s a steak taste test, sizzling for science. Our reporter Dr Andi Horvath meets with a scientist who’s trying to uncover the chemistry behind a seriously juicy steak.

ROBYN WARNER

I'm Professor Robyn Warner and I'm a meat scientist at Melbourne University in the Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences.

Very passionate about meat and meat biochemistry and meat structure. We've started some very new research on dry ageing of meat. So dry ageing of beef is really taking off around the world and it's being used in all the premium restaurants and butcher's shops, and it gets it easily double the price per kilogram of what we call wet-aged meat.

So dry ageing is a really old process which is the old way we used to age meat. So instead of wet ageing which we now call it in science and some of the industry, is when you put the meat into a vacuum bag and you have the, you know, sprayed in the fluids, and you get a lovely increase in flavour and tenderness.

So what dry ageing is, instead of putting into a vacuum bag, you actually leave it to hang and you actually let the surface dry out to stop the bacteria growing, and you have controlled temperature and humidity, low temperature and controlled humidity to dry out the surface.

Then you allow the enzymes in the meat to really work to develop the flavour and tenderness. So I was told when we started the research, everyone said, you won't get any difference between dry ageing and wet ageing, why are you doing the research? So I said, because I want to do it, I think we will. So we dry aged product, dry and wet aged it for five weeks or eight weeks.

Andi Horvath
So wow, you're out to find the ultimate steak and you've been comparing dry ageing with wet ageing. So what has the consumer told you last time you ran this sort of blind taste test between bits of steak?

Robyn Warner
Sure, well they basically said they really much preferred the flavour, and especially the tenderness and flavour of the dry aged beef compared to wet aged beef. So that's the beef story, and that really - dry aged beef is taking off around the world.

You go to any premium restaurant, they'll usually have dry aged beef, and even like a pub in Ireland that I went to had dry aged beef, but now we're starting our research on dry aged sheep meat. So here what we're trying to do is value add to mutton carcasses.

So there's a wonderful, wonderful guy in West - South Australia, sorry, who's actually dry ageing - first he's feeding the sheep saltbush, and then he's dry ageing it, and there's a restaurant in Melbourne that we've been to, Hereford Beefstouw and also one in Adelaide. So we actually have some of these product here to taste test, and so this research is just starting. So we've gone into his restaurant and tried this - it's a mutton product which normally you'd say was not very high value, so the producers are pretty excited to value add to mutton, a chance to make it…

Andi Horvath
Right, so you're doing mutton dressed as lamb.

Robyn Warner
Exactly, yes we are.

Andi Horvath
So take me through wet ageing and dry ageing, because I don't know what goes on behind the butcher's shop.

Robyn Warner
Sure.

Andi Horvath
So take us through that.

Robyn Warner
So normally with meat, what you do is you - so it might come into the butcher's shop as a carcass, and they'll maybe hang it for one or two weeks, and you'll get some increase in tenderisation. That's not dry ageing, although the butcher might tell you it is, but usually what happens around the world, is it goes - gets boned out and put into a bag. It's a vacuum bag and there's a vacuum drawer in the bag and it sits in this bag for two, three, four, five weeks before it's - and it gets this increase in tenderness and flavour, because there's these natural enzymes in the meat, called proteases, that break the meat down and get the great flavour and tenderness.

So with dry ageing, basically you have the same enzymes there, but there's something about the dry ageing process, that you get a premium flavour. Don't know why yet, we think some of our data says that you actually get more of these compounds that give you the lovely browning on the surface when you cook meat. They're called pyrazines. So that might be one of the reasons. It might also be to do with maybe the wet aged meat has a lower pH. So we're still trying to understand why it's better in flavour, and we're doing some more research on that.

So with the sheep meat, we'll actually get some really great sheep meat and dry and wet age it, and feed it - eat it for - give it to consumers, sorry, for up to eight weeks. Every week we'll do some consumption. We're trying to work out when's the, what's called the sweet spot. When is it really premium for flavour and texture? So that work's just starting.

Andi Horvath
Robyn, what misconceptions do people have about meat?

Robyn Warner
I have read in the newspaper that the people think if you hold meat for a period, it's not fresh anymore, so what they don't understand is, and it's really important to hold meat for a period, to allow this natural - lovely natural process to occur to get the premium product.

So you want to check that it's actually - say to your butcher, has it been aged for at least one or two weeks. So sometimes the consumer thinks fresh is best and they want to freshest from when it's been processed, but in fact that's not the case. You really want these enzymes - it's a little bit like when you mature cheese.

So I liken dry ageing, a little bit to the process when you're doing a beautiful dry cured ham. So I think the same, these natural enzymes, and I mean apart from the ones we know called calpains. The other one's called cathepsins are doing a great job that - I think they're the ones that are increasing the flavour, because they do - they're often investigated and really important for dry cured ham.

Andi Horvath
In your research career, what's surprised you, what's really captured your imagination, that you thought, wow, this is amazing.

Robyn Warner
I must say, this dry aged sheep meat has really captured my interest, and really trying to understand why it is a better product, chemically, because then if we know the why, we can then maybe help the wet aged product to be better. So make sure that the consumer gets a great product every time, you know, they buy meat. That's really what our aim is, to make sure they always get good quality product.

So the other topic that really, really intrigues me at the moment, is to work on, what I'd call, smart packaging. In this work, which we would like to start, and we're trying to find people to help us fund it, is to look at rather than using, having use-by dates on products, we'd have temperature sensing on the package and the temperature sensing would tell you the use-by date.

So it's actual use-by date, rather than an estimated, because really, the main thing that changes shelf life in terms of microbiology and colour, and eating quality, is all around temperature and control. Keeping the temperature very low. So temperature abuse is really bad for any food, especially meat.
So that's pretty exciting if we can get that going. Also I think, we're trying to protect our great products we make in Australia, in the overseas market, so we'd like to put that temperature sensing, together with maybe some anti-counterfeit, anti-tamperproof packaging as well. That's probably what's really rocking my boat at the moment, to try to get funding to work in that area.

Andi Horvath
Now Robyn, how did you get into this area, this is unusual isn't it, to say, hi, I'm a steak scientist.

Robyn Warner
I fell into it. I was told at university, only really bright people did research, and I didn't have really high marks and it was very hard to get a job in research. So I wasn't aiming to get a job in research, but there was no female dairy extension officers in Victoria, so I wanted to be the first female, dairy extension officer in Victoria.

Andi Horvath
What's your advice for girls out there at the moment thinking, hmm, I'm really interested in the biochemistry of food, or biochemistry of crops, what's your advice?

Robyn Warner
It’s about having… if you have a passion for something, that's what will take you forward, same in a PhD, same in anything.

Chris Hatzis
That’s Professor Robyn Warner. Or, as Dr Andi likes to call her, the steak scientist. Now, we’ve heard of the University of Melbourne students’ award-winning Shiraz here at Dookie and have gone to investigate further with Dookie’s viticulture and wine-making expert.

Chris Barnes
Chris Barnes is my name, and I'm the winemaker here at the Dookie College Winery, as well as lecturer in wine technology and viticulture in the Faculty of Veterinarian Agricultural Sciences, whew [laughs].

Andi Horvath
You've got a few projects on the go. Tell me about them.

Chris Barnes
Yes. Well our - I guess what we do up here at Dookie is two things, one is the teaching and learning that's involved with a number of wine subjects, which we run at the various sort of, I guess, enterprises we have here.

One of that is here where we are in the winery, and one of the subjects, that involves students going from the vineyard on a Monday morning harvesting grapes, taking the grapes into here in the winery, processing, fermenting, and pressing. The whole gamut of winemaking, until on the Friday of the same week, the wine that they've made goes into barrel, which eventually goes into bottles. It becomes that vintage and is named after my dog, Bertie. [Laughs].

Andi Horvath
That's one of the sniffer dogs. We just met Bertie.

Chris Barnes
Yeah, he's my dog. Everyone thinks he's somebody else's, but he's actually multi-talented. He's not only a winery dog, but he's also a trained sniffer dog.

Andi Horvath
Now, tell us about that?

Chris Barnes
Oh, the sniffer dogs? Well the sniffer dogs is a project which is being, well it's in our faculty, driven a great deal by my colleague, Sonja Needs who's worked in scent dogs, as they're known generically for many years.

But the projects that she's working on, the one we've sort of really focused on now, is where we can use dogs to detect at, obviously below human threshold, that's the key thing about their ability, a wine fault, and the fault is centred around a spoilage yeast. In wine there's good yeast, which to get a little bit technical is called Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but there's also a bad yeast, which is called Brettanomyces and that leads to spoilage in wine in barrels.

Now if we can detect it early on, we can remedy it, usually with sulphur dioxide, maybe with some acid adjusting, and so on. But the problem is, by the time we, as winemakers as humans, can detect it in the wine, it's usually too far gone. So if we can get dogs to come into the winery, sit in front of a barrel in the morning, and I go, oh, I better do, not a sample, because I can't smell it, but I send it away to a lab to analysed, and then I can say, oh, quick, get on top of it faster.

Andi Horvath
Most people train their dogs to find their keys, [laughs], but you've managed to get this dog to sniff out a problem in your wine.

Chris Barnes
I wish he could find my keys, the only other thing he can find is bacon sandwiches. [Laughs].

Andi Horvath
Bertie is a Labrador by the way.

Chris Barnes
Oh yes, I should - yes of course, this is radio, and if you saw Bertie, he's a black Labrador and his hobby really is bacon, pretty much.

Andi Horvath
Right.

Chris Barnes
Yeah.

Andi Horvath
Actually, I know a few people like that too, myself included. Chris, let's talk about your wine. You've got a barrel here, can I tap on it?

Chris Barnes
Yes.

Andi Horvath
Is it - what's the test if you're - I if I'm knocking on a barrel?

Chris Barnes
Well, it doesn't sound hollow, so it's full.

Andi Horvath
Okay, yeah, it does sound full.

Chris Barnes
Yeah, and this is an oak barrel. Most people sort of are familiar with wine barrels, it's a very old part of winemaking, you know, many centuries old. But what I've got in here is maturing the Shiraz that we harvested with the students in 2017 vintage. Now that means the picking, which up here at Dookie, and it varies from region to region, but up here at Dookie, it's about the last week of February into the first week of March, depending on the year.

So I've got a number of these barrels, and I've also got wine that's in stainless steel tanks as well, so I have a combination of the whole thing, and this is maturing. The different barrels, there's French barrels and American barrels, and there are some older barrels, and newer barrels. So all of them give different texture and flavour to the wine, and eventually when I blend it all together, it will hopefully have more complexity, and therefore be a better wine.

Andi Horvath
Chris, is this one of these steel barrels?

Chris Barnes
That's what we call a tank, and stainless steel, and the importance about being stainless steel, it means we can clean it, so it can certainly never be the vector for microbiological spoilage, and they're - they can be all sorts of sizes. That one there is only 400 litres, the one behind you there is 3000. That's 8,000 - 10,000. We have outside 10,000's, but these tanks, exactly the same design as you're seeing here, can get up to a million litres in capacity.

Andi Horvath
They've got a poster here…

Chris Barnes
Yes.

Andi Horvath
…and it says, the making of a Gold Medal wine, and this students who've done this wine subject, have made a Gold Medal Shiraz. It…

Chris Barnes
Yeah.

Andi Horvath
Okay, what makes a Gold Medal Shiraz?

Chris Barnes
First of all a great fruit. We got very good grapes in 2016, which is this year, so this is the wine that was harvested in March of this year, so that comes from a vineyard very, very close to the College, literally 3 kilometres away, so you could walk there in 20 minutes. The students harvested the grapes by hand, so brought that in, and then went right through the winemaking process, and I decided that the wine was good enough to enter into a wine show, and it won a gold medal, which means, a gold medal is - gets a certain number of points. But to put that into perspective, it puts it about the top five to six per cent of wines.

Andi Horvath
So do the students get to drink the wine afterwards?

Chris Barnes
Oh afterwards, yes. What we do, obviously the wine, when they leave here after their residential school, it's in barrel, so it's not ready for drinking, but then the way we work that, is that the students who come back to do the same subject 12 months later, bottle on behalf of their colleagues. So therefore, 12 months later, we're still in touch with the students, and we say, here's your wine, and part of it is we let them have six bottles each for themselves, family, friends and so on, and they can purchase a little bit more if they want to after that. So it means that they can then come back. Also their involvement, while they're not face to face with us, is designing the label. So the label that goes on there is a collaborative arrangement between us, to make sure it's got all the legal requirements, and has the appropriate acknowledgment to the university and all these sorts of things, but the actual label itself, the look and the feel of it, is designed by the students.

Andi Horvath
I hate to say it, but we do judge a book by its cover sometimes. So what's your favourite label so far?

Chris Barnes
Well, my favourite label has been the one with the beautiful profile of Bertie the dog, which was just him. [Laughs]. But then you see I'm terribly biased about Bertie. The one this year has a picture of the winery with Bertie running past, but it's also got on the back label, a very cute photograph - look the technology is beyond me, but the way you can a photograph into what looks like a watercolour painting, and it's a picture that I had no idea what he was taking. One of the students took it, of me walking through the vineyard with Bertie trailing on behind me. So that's my favourite.

Andi Horvath
What's one of the biggest misconceptions about wine that you encounter in the public?

Chris Barnes
Look, it's interesting. I think one of the basic misconceptions is when people who know about wine, or describing wine, they'll talk about, for example, this wine has flavours of raspberries and plums and cherries, to use the red wine example, and people then say to me, well how many punnets of raspberries did you put in this, or how many boxes of cherries, you know, to get that. Well, no, it all comes from grapes.

So I think that's a really basic misconception, is that wine by law, and also by tradition, the whole thing, for many, many centuries, is 100 per cent grapes. So all these extraordinary flavours and textures we get in wine are all grapes. So I think that's a really simple one.

Andi Horvath
Alright, a curly question for you: wine, an art or a science?

Chris Barnes
Wine is halfway between art and science. Look, there's a lot of craft in it, in the old fashioned sort of idea, that you've got to understand and build up a - I guess, a body of knowledge with the grapes you're working, where you're working, in the sense of the place, the terroir, in other words, the exigencies within your winery, and then let the two things develop together, to make something of really high quality.

So I think it's more about craftsmanship, you know, you're making a thing of beauty, but at the same time, it's got to be sound, it's got to be structural, you know, it's got to have a useful nature to it. So I'd put it more in the sense of not being what an artist does in terms of creating a beautiful painting, or a sculpture, but perhaps what a craftsman does, in terms of a beautiful chair that is a thing of beauty, but you've still got to be able to sit on it and use it.

Andi Horvath
As a wine scientist, what's been the most surprising bit of science that you've encountered in your wine research?

Chris Barnes
I think in our research, the complexity of flavour is extraordinary, and also how we as human beings, and the research that we're doing, actually respond to flavour, and what people refer to as taste, but taste and flavour are different subconsciously. So people will have likes and dislikes, and when you're doing research about trying to establish whether people, they tick the box about whether they think this flavour's strong, or medium, and low, and this old fashioned sort of research into flavour and structure, and quality, but actually if you look at the biometrics in people. So you look at what their face is doing. You look at the heat signature, from whether they're flushing. You look at their eyes, how they're actually doing that is extraordinary. So it's the subconscious reaction that you have to whether you like it, don't like it, in simplistic sense, or even something as to whether you think for example, the flavours of plum or dark berry are stronger or less, or so on. So that's been extraordinary.

Andi Horvath
Okay Chris, just - can you give us a tip? When you're in the bottle shop and you've got brain fog, where do you go?

Chris Barnes
Look I think really that you want to be looking at producers that are reasonably large. Smaller, tiny producers have the problem that I mentioned before about being linked so inherently to the vineyards. So you can have variations from year to year. Now that can be marvellous variation. Also being small, they're going to have a higher overhead, so in terms of value for money, you know, I would be saying in the $15 - $20 bracket, look for a larger producer. In terms of reliability, in Australia, if you like reds, the most reliable grape variety is Shiraz, and if you like whites, the most reliable grape variety is Riesling. So - and they will both be the best value for money, for all the reasons I mentioned, in terms of volume and so on, and they're the great two white and red grape varieties of Australia.

Andi Horvath
Next time someone looks at a wine bottle or pours a glass of wine, as a wine scientist, what would you like them to think, or understand?

Chris Barnes
First and foremost, that it's an agricultural product. That it's not something that's created out of thin air to sort of appear on a wine merchant's shelf or a list, that it actually is hard work in farming and all the exigencies of farming that people understand when they think about the crop of the wheat crop or the fruit crop, when they think about it, you know a cyclone in Queensland, or what have you or a flood, we have the same problems, and unless we've got that quality that turns up here at the winery door, then we can't make good wine. So it's effectively agriculture and then on top of that, what we do, is really just take that and try and preserve, perhaps enhance and add a bit of complexity to those flavours that are there, that's grown in that place in the vineyard.

Chris Hatzis
Chris Barnes, wine-making expert at Dookie, with all the great bottle shop hacks. So, now you know. Dookie has a brewery, too. And a beer expert, and biochemist, Dr Charles Pagel who is chatting here with Claudia Hooper.

Claudia Hooper
So Andi's just been interviewing the wine man, now you're the beer guy. Is there a bit of a rivalry between the two drinks?

Charles Pagel
Well, Chris actually did some lecturing on the beer subject on the history of beer. He found a quote that he's very keen on, and will repeat it at any opportunity, which is that, wine is considered wine for culture, and beer is for barbarians. The sort of difference in the north European and the southern Europeans. So we're very keen on that, beer for barbarians.

Claudia Hooper
So I'm assuming your students aren't barbarians, what do they do when they're studying beer?

Charles Pagel
So we have two subjects, two Breadth subjects. The first Breadth subject, they learn about the ingredients that go into beer, the processes that are involved, and the different styles that are produced. How those styles arose, so there's a lot of political and social history as well involved, as well as science, agricultural production, and food processing.

In the second subject, they get an opportunity to come up to Dookie, and in the old winery here, they'll make a small batch of beer. So we give them a list of the ingredients, they decide what sort of beer they want to make, and how they're going to make it, so they'll do the calculations and come up with a recipe. They actually brew it, bottle it, and then we take it back to Parkville, and about four weeks later, they'll go through and they'll judge each other's efforts. So they'll mark each of their beers.

Claudia Hooper
So how do you mark a beer?

Charles Pagel
So there's a number of things you look at. So there's the appearance of the beer, what does the head look like, is it clear, is it the right colour? Then there's the aroma, does it smell right, does it smell nice? Are there any obvious off flavours, off aromas, the taste itself, and then the overall impression as well. Do you think it's actually any good?

Claudia Hooper
How did you get into doing this kind of work?

Charles Pagel
So my background is a biochemist. My undergraduate degree was in biological sciences, and we studied biochemistry, microbiology, mycology, and the one thing that we all wanted a subject on was brewing. But in the university at the time where I was doing my undergraduate degree, there was no such subject. So the proposal came from the university to start a brewing subject, and so because I have an interest and I've brewed at home for a long time, I was more than happy to put my hand up to coordinate these two subjects.

Claudia Hooper
Do you get any students coming back to you saying, “I've started my own microbrewery, this is where I'm off to now?”

Charles Pagel
This is the first year we've run the subject, but even in that time, we've had students who've gone to work as brand ambassadors for breweries doing casual work. I've heard about one student there who's been offered a job in a brewery down in Melbourne to get some work experience, and when he moves up to Wagga next year, he's been offered a job in a brewery in Wagga, and having done these subjects, it's been of great benefit. So without the subjects, he wouldn't have been offered that job. So there are students already, even after the first year, going into the industry.

Claudia Hooper
Can you tell me about any of the misconceptions around beer brewing? Is it easy? What are some of the things that can go wrong?

Charles Pagel
A lot of people don't understand what goes into beer. So there's not a lot of people know about hops and the different types of hops, what they give to the finished beer, and the fact that most beers are produced with just simply four simple ingredients, malt, yeast, water and hops. But it's the - how you mix those ingredients together that produces the vast range of beers that are available from lagers to porters and stouts. So it's really a - quite a revelation to the students that they can produce all these different types of beers from just four simple ingredients.

Claudia Hooper
Can you tell me a little bit more about how you get those differences between say a lager and a stout, a pale?

Charles Pagel
So a major determiner of the finished product is the type of malt that you use. So, all beers will need a very pale malt, because they have enzymatic activity that you need to convert the starch into sugar, but the darker beers obviously have a lot more of the dark malts, the heavily roasted malts. They also - differences in the type of hops that you use, so there's a great range of hops nowadays, and that's been a big growth in the hop industry, particularly in Victoria and Tasmania. So the different aromas and the different flavours of the hops, and how you combine those and what amounts, and what ratios, will determine largely what the finished product is like.

Claudia Hooper
Earlier you mentioned some of the interesting areas around the history of beer and the politics, can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Charles Pagel
So yeah, it's a very interesting aspect. Beer has been produced for thousands of years, and the different styles have largely arisen as a result of a mixture of political and social history.

So in Germany for example, you have the Reinheitsgebot, Bavarian Purity Law, which established certain methods of brewing that were allowed, and other methods were prohibited. Monastic brewing, brewing in monasteries in Belgium and Germany has also influenced the development of styles in those countries.

Things like random chance events, so hybridisation between two yeasts produced a very distinct separate yeast species called Saccharomyces Pastorianus, and that's the lager yeast, and that produces a very distinct lager style obviously.

Claudia Hooper
Lots of people to debate about which countries produce the best beer, do you have any insights into that?

Charles Pagel
The UK. [Laughs].

Claudia Hooper
Done. Easy.

Charles Pagel
Being English, it's the UK.

Andi Horvath
In fact, isn't it warm?

Charles Pagel
It's not warm and it's not flat. In fact, it's one of the preconceptions that I have to try and convince the students of in the first subject, is that beer from England isn't warm and flat, it's actually very flavourful.

Andi Horvath
Okay, I have to ask the question, is it an art or is it a science?

Charles Pagel
My point of view, it's a science. [Laughs]

Chris Hatzis
Well, you heard the man, beer is science. I couldn't agree more. Dr Charles Pagel there. So far we've heard about the chemical processes involved in creating flavour in our favourite foods, but what can new technology offer to improve agricultural practices?

Graham Brodie
I'm Graham Brodie and I'm an electrical engineer based here at the agricultural campus at Dookie, and I've developed a microwave system to kill weeds which are resistant to herbicides.

Andi Horvath
Because weeds are taking over the planet, and also they're in the way of crops and they're becoming resistant. When I think about microwaving weeds, I sort of think of my home microwave, kind of like an Ikea hack put onto my lawn mower as I microwave plants, but it's not quite that.

Graham Brodie
It uses the same idea as your microwave oven, but it's on an industrial scale. So I've set it up in trailer, it's got industrial microwave generators, which are water cooled and much more efficient. They funnel the energy and project it down onto the ground using a horn antenna, and that actually then heats the plants, heats the soil, and that's what kills the weeds and the seeds.

Andi Horvath
Now, what do you actually microwave? Do you microwave the soil before you plant your crops to get rid of the weeds, or can you microwave your crops whilst they're there?

Graham Brodie
We can do both. So we can actually do a pre-treatment and microwave the soil, kill off the seed bank, kill off some pathogens, plant into that as soon as it's cooled, or we can actually go down between the inter row and kill the weeds which have emerged in the crop, and not affect the crop.

Andi Horvath
This is a brilliant idea, zapping the weeds with high temperatures, because microwaves work by heating up the water inside things and sort of shaking them to a point where they boil.

Graham Brodie
Yeah, that's exactly right. So when we treat the weeds, we create little steam explosions inside the plants and that's what actually kills them.

Andi Horvath
This is brilliant, how did this idea come about?

Graham Brodie
It's two-fold, I've had a long history with doing microwave engineering, and when I first joined the university, I was working with a group in the forestry department, who were actually microwaving timber, to actually create steam explosions so that they could dry it faster and impregnate it better.

Andi Horvath
So you just took it one step further, as applying it to soils and weeds.

Graham Brodie
The microwaving timber was something that we were working on in a large group, and it was coming to an end and I was looking for my next project. So I thought, well I know that there's problems with herbicide resistance, I know that this technology works on things which are made of, you know, plant material, and so I just applied it to weeds.

Andi Horvath
Are weeds taking over the planet?

Graham Brodie
Yes and no. I mean a weed is a plant that's just in the wrong place. So where they're meant to be, that's where they should be, but they're not always where they're meant to be. In terms of competition with crops, it's a big issue though, because the weed competes with the crop for nutrient. It competes with the crop for sunlight, all of those things. We face a couple of important issues into the future, and one of them is food security. So actually being able to grow more for less is incredibly important in our modern world.

Andi Horvath
What has surprised you about this research?

Graham Brodie
Probably a couple of interesting things that have happened is, when we actually planted crops into the treated soil, I was surprised at how well they went. I can remember telling one of my students who was helping me with that part of the project, if we're not causing damage to these crops, I'll be really happy, but in fact what we found was, that we got twice the actual yield.

Andi Horvath
So microwave has actually super boosted it, because it didn't have to compete with all the weeds and things maybe.

Graham Brodie
Yeah, that's exactly right, so weeds, pathogens, all the problems in the soil, it seemed to actually control many of those.

Chris Hatzis
Dr Graham Brodie with his excellent idea - microwaving weeds and the soil to increase crop yields. That’s technology for the ground, but what about technology in the air? Specifically, drones?

Sigfredo Fuentes
So my name is Sigfredo Fuentes and I'm a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, in the Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences.

Andi Horvath
I saw you playing with drones earlier. What do you do with drones?

Sigfredo Fuentes
Well, basically, the drone technology can be applied for many different aspects in agriculture and animal science as well. So we're trying to do a lot of research on how to use drones to improve or increase efficiencies in agricultural production.

Andi Horvath
So from viewing the crops from above, gives you more information about how hydrated they are, how healthy they are, and what their needs are, is that right?

Sigfredo Fuentes
Yeah, oh well, it will give you information or raw data. So actually what we say, is that the drone technology is really easy to acquire the data, but how to interpret that data into meaningful information for the growers, that is a different story. So that is for example, companies when all this drone boom started, like 2015 was the year of the drone, and there were many companies, that they were offering services. Engineering companies that they say, oh yeah, we can fly drones, we can obtain the data, easy, but how to interpret the data, and to give good recommendations to growers is a way different story, and they promise too much.

So last year, 2016, 350 companies, they went bankrupt, just in America, because they were promising too much to people. We can increase your yield, we can increase your water productivity, we can manage your pests and diseases. That was BS basically [laughs], because they didn't have the algorithms.

We are working on the algorithms now, and we're developing those algorithms now. So many other universities are doing the same, and we're applying machine learning, so they can learn from the data that we have been acquiring through the years.

Andi Horvath
So the data is as good as your good information, but we need the algorithms to interpret what's going on with the various crops. What sort of crops have you been testing?

Sigfredo Fuentes
So we've been doing it on peach farms, apples. We've done it in grapevines, olive trees, pecan nuts, many different crops, not only here in Australia. We work in close collaboration with Europe, Chile, South Africa, and China.

China we're doing a lot of collaborations at the moment, because they don't have any problems flying drones. So do you know that here in Australia, we have a lot of regulations, so actually, it's the second biggest country in regulations about drone technology, the first one is America, USA. In China you can fly anywhere, anytime, they don't care. So for us to do research, there is like heaven. Then we come back with the models that we develop in China, we can come back to Australia and try to see if they work, and then tweak it.

Andi Horvath
What's surprised you so far in the research?

Sigfredo Fuentes
The quick adoption of the technology, or the lack of quick adoption of the technology. So agriculture is one of the lowest rate adoption in new technologies basically. It's not only here in Australia, it's all around the world, but there is a reason for that. So technology is - the cost is decreasing more and more. So growers, they don't want to invest as much money, for example, three years ago, a drone with all the cameras cost like $50,000, now you can get it for $5,000, so - and that is in three years. So then the growers that were, right, so if I invest in this, maybe in three years, it's going to be obsolete.

Andi Horvath
Would it be fair to say, that this is actually of national interest to future food security, to maximise our crops?

Sigfredo Fuentes
Well actually, that is our priority I think at the moment. Not only here in Australia, but around the world, is how to maximise, not quantity of the data - quantity of the products or food, is the quality of the food. So you can decrease the yield, but increase the quality of that yield in the sense of nutritional value, because according to climate change predictions, we need to produce double the amount of food by 2050, because we're going to be 9.7 billion people around, so we need to produce double amount of food in half of the arable land, because soil is one of the resources that is not renewable, and we're losing soil.

They are eroding, they are - maluse of fertiliser, overuse of irrigation, so salinisation is a big story here in Australia. So there's a lot of soils here in Australia that are saline, and it's not because they're naturally saline, so it's abuse of irrigation for a hundred years.

Those are really big problems, so how to solve them, is implementation of technology, and how to increase not only yield, but the quality of the produce. I used to not be that optimistic like two years ago, because I work on - I teach climate change effects on agriculture, food security and stuff like that. I wasn't optimistic at that point, but with all the technology that is increasing and all the applications of digital technology, I think we have a chance.

The other alternatives that we are using is we're researching a lot in microgreens, so microgreens are basically sprouts of different - like for example tomato plants or lettuce, any plant, then you have seeds, and in ten days you have a microgreen.

So what we've finding is that microgreens, if you have the same biomass of a full grown lettuce, the microgreens have more nutritional value than a full grown lettuce, that it will take you, like weeks, to produce. So then in ten days we can have a production to do, for example shakes or salads. So we're researching a lot in that area as well.

Andi Horvath
Sigfredo, how did you get into this area? What ignited your imagination in the area of agricultural science?

Sigfredo Fuentes
I'm Chilean, originally, and I grew in the regions in Chile that is winemaking regions. So they're all the viticultural area are there, so they're exporting 70 per cent of their wine from there. So it's really difficult to not going around wine, and I remember my grandfather used to give me like pieces of bread dipped in red wine when I was like four years old, so then you get the taste for it.

So then I went to agriculture, because of viticulture and winemaking, and then obviously that is part of food science, so I went to food science and then applying engineering principles, I went to all the technology part. So my background is engineering, but in agriculture, and then with the same cameras - so basically we're doing biometrics on humans, to detect how you like a product without asking you any questions.

So we can detect if you are happy, sad, disgusted etc. So that is the booth that is in the sensory area, and then in animals, you can do the same, and how to detect stress levels for animals, related to the quality of the producers that you are doing, meat, milk et cetera. So yeah, that integration part is really attractive at the moment, basically.

Chris Hatzis
Dr Sigfredo Fuentes, making sense of the data we can get from drones. It’s been quite the long day here at Dookie. But before we head back, we need to see the other residents of the farm: the sheep. We go for a stroll through the serene grounds and down through the trees to the sheep's pen.

Andi Horvath
Hi.

Murray McKenzie
How you going?

Andi Horvath
I'm Andi.

Murray McKenzie
Hi Andi.

Andi Horvath
And you are?

Murray McKenzie
Murray McKenzie.

Andi Horvath
Murray, great, can we interview you about sheep?

Murray McKenzie
I guess so. [Laughs]

Andi Horvath
Alright.

Murray McKenzie
I'm Murray McKenzie, I'm the Chairman of the Dookie North East Side Evaluation Site. I'm a merino breeder at Benalla and been involved here at Dookie for the past 18 years, running trials here.

Andi Horvath
I'm going to be a real city slicker and ask the really dumb question, but how come they all kind of like stand together, like in a huddle [laughs], and are they happy?

Murray McKenzie
Yeah, of course they're happy. They're in a huddle because we've put them in a pen, but - and we've kept them in a huddle, but sheep are very - they like to be in mobs themselves. They don't like being out on their own, they get stressed, so they're much more comfortable when they're together like they are.

Andi Horvath
[Laughs]. How come some of them are looking at me? [Laughs]

Murray McKenzie
It's probably all to do with noise and various things that are happening around. So they may not necessarily be looking at you, but movement, anything makes them look.

Andi Horvath
Do you think my hat's disturbing them?

Murray McKenzie
No I don't think so. [Laughs]

Andi Horvath
My hat has actually got sequins on it that glitter. Can you tell different sheep just by looking at them?

Murray McKenzie
Yeah you can if you're spending a lot of time with them. Being a stud breeder, we have rams in the shed for shows and sales and things like that, and once you've - because we feed them night and morning, so you see them. We don't intimately handle them every day, but we walk in the shed, feed them, and see them every day, and they all end up with personalities.

Some get really, really quiet and they'll come up and want you to pat them, even though we haven't made them pets. So just like humans, everyone's got a different personality. I've had some in the - we just had my ram sale only last week, and some of those rams have been in the shed for six months, and there's one in particular, like he was - you would never ever calm him, like he's still as wild as he was when he first came in.

Andi Horvath
So he's a nervous Nelly.

Murray McKenzie
Yeah, and yet others, who have quietened down and they're really quiet and you've got to kick them out of your road, but yeah. So it's just like anything, everyone's got a different personality.

Andi Horvath
That one's really looking at me again. I get a bit unnerved by the sort of - even domesticated animals looking at me. [Laughs].

Chris Hatzis
That’s Murray MacKenzie talking sheep with Dr Andi. It’s a fond goodbye to Dookie, what a great Open Day it has been. Now for the long drive home, but it’s a lovely drive.

Thanks to all our guests: Professor Robyn Warner, Chris Barnes, Dr Charles Pagel, Dr Graham Brodie, Dr Sigfredo Fuentes and Murray McKenzie.

And thanks to our reporters Dr Andi Horvath and Claudia Hooper. Thanks also to Stuart Winthrope from Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on October 18, 2017. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website.

Audio engineering by Arch Cuthbertson, co-production by Dr Andi Horvath and Claudia Hooper.

Check out the rest of the amazing content on the Pursuit website. And if you're listening to this on iTunes, drop us a little review. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.