Introduction: This is a GRDC podcast.

00:00:12:23 - 00:01:18:13

Prue Adams: It's the 20th anniversary of GRDC's National Variety Trials program. So we thought it was a good time to take a look back at how this groundbreaking program kicked off. Hello there, I'm Prue Adams. The NVT program is the largest coordinated trial network in the world. Each year, more than 640 trials are conducted across more than 300 locations Australia wide. It covers ten different crops and while it has undoubtedly empowered grain growers and their advisors trusted independent results to support varietal decision making. Like most world firsts, there were early teething problems. Dr Steve Jefferies was managing director of the GRDC. When the NVT program was brought in-house eight years ago. So, Steve, let's jump in the time machine and head back to 2005. Tell me how the NVT trial process came about and why?

00:01:19:01 - 00:02:48:24

Dr Steve Jefferies: Well, if you go back to the early 2000s, prior to that, all 90 plus percent of plant breeding in Australia was undertaken in the public sector through state government departments in the universities. And in the late 90s the evolution of hybrid canola technology essentially created the opportunity for value capture in canola breeding, which brought private investment into canola breeding in Australia, and then in about 1998, was the launch of the endpoint royalty system in Australia, unique to the world, I might say, which created value capture opportunity for self-pollinated crops like wheat and barley. And that led to the transition of plant breeding into the private sector. But during those early 2000s, most of the trialling or variety trialling was undertaken by the state governments, but at that time they were also the breeders and at that time they were earning royalties from endpoint royalties. So there was some sort of financial conflict. There was private companies that felt that they weren't getting a fair shot, so GRDC thought it was a time given all of those changes, to create a fully independent service provision model that didn't rely on co-government investment and that created a uniform, independent platform for evaluating varieties irrespective of where they came from the public, private sector or which state or government that they came from. And it provided that independent information to advise growers on their choice of varieties.

00:02:49:13 - 00:02:59:21

Prue Adams: So you did sort of cover it there, but what was the original purpose, I suppose, and how did that evolve into something which was even more positive? Probably.

00:03:00:06 - 00:04:32:12

Dr Steve Jefferies: Yeah. So the original purpose was to provide that independence because of all those changes to the structure of plant breeding in Australia and conflicts of interest and the like associated with royalties. What the other benefits of it actually came out was that there was increased confidence from growers in the information that they were getting on new varieties, and the depth of the varieties that they were able to have a look at in terms of their choice and were getting information on and they were making much better informed and they grew confidence in the system such that the adoption of new varieties accelerated enormously. So that was a big benefit, like the impact to the grains industry as a total was massive. It just through getting, say, a five or 10 per cent gain in yield adopted two years earlier. It has transformational impact over a period of time. That was one thing. I led a breeding company from 2000 to 2016, and the NVT system also had an impact on us in that the confidence that growers got with the NVT system meant that all we had to do was to make sure that our varieties were the best in the NVT trial, that is, our varieties with just the highest performance. That meant we focused all of our energy on developing better varieties instead of investing a lot of money into the marketing varieties which is exactly what happens in the US and in Europe, where the breeders spend just as much money on marketing, where the breeding community here spends very little on marketing and invested in breeding, because growers trust the NVT system to advise them on which varieties to go.

00:04:32:25 - 00:04:44:05

Prue Adams: So being a world first, as you say, in terms of the size and the independence of it, of course there are going to be certain challenges that come with that because it hasn't been done before on that scale, what were those challenges?

00:04:44:24 - 00:05:35:23

Dr Steve Jefferies: A lot of early teething, transitioning from the state governments that all had their own way of running the variety trials to getting consistent approaches, getting consistency of things like statistical analysis and design and being able to undertake all that statistical analysis in a very timely way, so that the growers got the information in time to make decisions so they could plant their crop on time. So it went to a service model to become truly independent, we had to develop a capacity right across Australia to do really high quality trialling. So it actually contributed largely to the evolution of a service research industry where companies like Calyx and Living Farm and others learnt and, you know, they went through some teething problems in the early days, but they have learnt to provide high quality services to NVT and they've used NVT as a backbone to their business. And that's been a win win for everybody. So yeah, there were some early teething problems.

00:05:36:01 - 00:05:51:23

Prue Adams: Part of that teething process, I suppose, was growers not being super satisfied at that stage with where things were grown or at the time that things were sown and that sort of thing and then when you came in in 2016, how did you remedy that situation?

00:05:51:27 - 00:07:05:12

Dr Steve Jefferies: So when I came in as MD in 2016, we really engaged with growers and listening to what needed to change at the GRDC, and we got really positive feedback about NVT. They really valued it, but they also got a lot of criticism, and the criticism was around the choice of the soil types that the trials were planted on, or the place in the rotation or the time of seeding. It wasn't appropriate for that particular or wasn't best practice in their local area and the relevance of those trials was really challenging, or the results from those trials was challenging so we got a lot of criticism of the NVT program aligned around that, and we felt that we needed to unify processes and get them up to best practice. And to do that, we needed to change the whole management structure of it. So we recruited Sean Coffey, who leads it now. We brought the team in-house and then worked methodically over a period of time to improve all the processes and also the team have brought in a grower advisor and agronomy advisor network right across Australia that provide local input into the management and operations of the trials to make sure that they're relevant and that's proved to be a really powerful tool. So I guess ever since then, since we brought it in-house, there's been just consistent and ongoing improvements in the process of NVT.

00:07:05:27 - 00:07:15:22

Prue Adams: That was what I was going to ask next is how has that evolved, and have you been able to solve the issues that you had before it was under the GRDC umbrella?

00:07:16:10 - 00:07:55:01

Dr Steve Jefferies: The feedback from growers with the changes that have been brought in by the NVT have been really positive. The evidence is clear that the trials are so much more fit for purpose, so much more relevant. And that's that mechanism that advisory committees and things are there to ensure that it is maintained. GRDC has also evolved the whole of its service contracting models, where it's actually put in much more refined milestones and deliverables, and the like to monitor the performance of the service providers to make sure that they are doing exactly the right thing at the right time and being consistent right across Australia. Growers love NVT and they keep a close eye on it, so if there's anything goes wrong, the GRDC soon know about it.

00:07:55:03 - 00:08:01:20

Prue Adams: Where do you think it's going to end up? I mean, I know you're not with GRDC now, but will it continue to evolve?

00:08:02:05 - 00:09:57:25

Dr Steve Jefferies: I think there will be ongoing improvements, and as farming systems change, you're bringing in things like this is old now and GM canola changes how you do trialing when you're dealing with a GM crop and there's new crops that come in, you know, there's lentils and chickpeas and faba beans and everything now in the NVT program, when it started, it was pretty much wheat and barley and canola. So that's changed. But the other thing that we've learnt about NVT over the time, even though it was set up as an independent source of information for growers, it's been so much more powerful in terms of being a really powerful extension tool growers are attracted to and want to see their varieties growing in the field. And I was only talking to some agronomists from Western Australia last week who were saying, we need variety trials, we need NVT to attract the crowd so that they can extend their information. In this case, it was all about pulse agronomy. So they have proven to be a massive extension tool to bring people to not only learn about varieties, but learn about a lot of other things. The third real high impact, which I think NVT is only really just touching the surface on, and that is this enormous data. It's the most comprehensive system anywhere in the world and the largest, most comprehensive set of variety performance data anywhere in the world. And that data is enormously powerful. And through the tools of big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, the opportunities to mine so much more value out of that data to provide more insights into how the crop production and productivity and profitability, interactions between genotype and management and the environment that can lead to better systems and the evolution of better farming systems and more profitability and productivity is massive, I think, and that's something that is a real focus for the NVT going forward, is how they collect that data and how they manage that data to enable that mining and bringing extra value out of that enormously powerful data set.

00:09:57:27 - 00:09:59:15

Prue Adams: Great spot to end. Thanks, Steve.

00:09:59:17 - 00:10:00:19

Dr Steve Jefferies: No worries. Pleasure.

00:10:08:02 - 00:10:20:27

Dr Steve Jefferies: That was the now semi-retired Dr Steve Jefferies, former managing director of GRDC. More information on this topic can be found in the description box of this podcast, or online at GRDC.com.au This has been a GRDC podcast. I'm Prue Adams. Thanks for listening.