Intro: This is a GRDC podcast.

00:00:12:10 - 00:01:05:14

Hilary Sims: Hi there, I'm Hilary Sims. Each year, the GRDC Seed of Light Award recognises the outstanding contribution, dedication, and commitment of individuals to communicating research outcomes to people working in the grains industry. At the Goondiwindi GRDC Grains Research Update event in March 2025, Mark Congreve was presented with the prestigious award for his valuable work in the agricultural extension space. Mark is a senior consultant at Independent Consultants Australia Network (ICAN) and there's every chance that you've sat in one of his GRDC webinars or workshops at some point in time. I caught up with Mark to hear his thoughts on the changing landscape of agricultural extension, and what the Seed of Light award means to him. To start off, I asked him how he describes the work he does. Here's Mark.

00:01:06:05 - 00:01:46:15

Mark Congreve: Really good question. My son and daughter are 23 and 25, and they've probably been asking the same question for about 15 years because they don't really understand it either, because it's so diverse. Mostly what I'm doing is extension mostly for the grains industry. Being a consultant, we do work in other industries as well, little bits and pieces, but mostly in the grains. And I guess if I had to summarise it, I'm not really an agronomist. I'm not really a researcher, but I'm trying to link the two, and I'm trying to take the research and put that into language and format and how we can apply that for growers and agronomists.

00:01:46:25 - 00:01:50:08

Hilary Sims: And Mark, what does your career journey look like to get to this point?

00:01:50:17 - 00:02:33:07

Mark Congreve: I did an ag science undergraduate degree and then I joined into the multinational chemical companies. So a lot of my background training has come through a couple of different multinational companies started with Agrosciences, which is now Corteva, and then did a stint with Syngenta as well. So all up I probably did the best part of 24, I suppose, years with those multinational chemical companies. That was over a whole range of different projects over that time frame. For the last 13-14 years now, I've been working as a private consultant, largely in this extension space. I tend to spend most of my time in the weed space, but not exclusively in that space.

00:02:33:13 - 00:02:40:28

Hilary Sims: And you've just touched on it with your comment on weeds taking up a lot of your time. But what are your other main areas of focus for the grains industry?

00:02:41:02 - 00:03:16:07

Mark Congreve: So I do a lot of work in the herbicide space. We also as ICAN run the GRDC updates for the northern region, so I get a bit involved in the general updates side of things. In the past, I spent a fair bit of time in the insecticide insect management areas. Probably not doing much of that in the recent years. Bit of biotechnology along the way. Bit of pretty much everything when you're a consultant, you get all sorts of strange calls. Can you help us with this? And often you can. But yeah, predominantly it's in the herbicide space is what occupies 90 per cent of my time.

00:03:16:10 - 00:03:18:24

Hilary Sims: And what's a typical day in the office look like for you?

00:03:18:26 - 00:04:13:06

Mark Congreve: I don't think there's any such thing as a typical day in the office. Very diverse in this role. I'm in Western Australia at the moment, talking at some GRDC updates. I've been invited over to talk about some of the experiences from the East and how that would apply to the West. So I'm doing that at the moment. I'm recording this podcast right now. Before we move into a GRDC GRC update later today. I just recorded another podcast earlier this morning on management of feathertop rhodes grass and fleabane into South Australia, which are emerging in that space. I've been working this week in between meetings on GRDC project management, working with researchers, designing field trial protocols. We've got field trials in the ground. We're trying to run field walks. I'm writing manuals for GRDC at the moment. It's extremely diverse. Absolutely no day is the same as the one before.

00:04:13:10 - 00:04:17:26

Hilary Sims: And what does being recognised with the GRDC Seed of Light award mean to you?

00:04:18:03 - 00:04:46:27

Mark Congreve: I think everybody loves to be recognised for what they do. I think, you know, as an industry, we all contribute a lot and quite often go over and above the expected level of performance in the number of hours, you know, we tend to put in as an industry doesn't mean whether you're an agronomist or grower or an extension consultant. We all work pretty hard in the industry. It's great to have your clients or your customers or whoever they may be, recognise that they value the work that you do.

00:04:47:03 - 00:04:57:09

Hilary Sims: Absolutely. And so, Mark, I'm keen to know what you see as some of the key moments for the grains extension space in terms of practice change. Do you have any examples you can share?

00:04:57:18 - 00:06:29:24

Mark Congreve: Yeah, I think you hit on the right word there. It's practice change. You know, as an industry from a GRDC's perspective, we can keep funding research after research after research. But if it doesn't end up in the hands of the growers in a format where they can actually make practice change, then there's no point doing the research. So it has to be extended and has to be in a format that can assist them in implementing that. I spend a lot of time talking about how to manage and how to optimise glyphosate with herbicide resistance. That's coming along and some of the things we do running my training system. So I talk about this quite a lot. A lot of what we've done on the farm when it comes to herbicide management, weight management and herbicide application is very much around optimising the operational efficiency on the farm, not necessarily how the products are going to best perform. So we might want to put multiple things in the spray tank and do one pass rather than two passes and all this sort of stuff, because we're all busy and we've got to get across the country and it's all time pressure to do it. But that might not be the best thing to do. Sometimes it's as simple as, you know, splitting two products out that don't like to go together and applying them separately and then ending up with a much better result at the end of the day. So it's some of those little tricks and tactics that we can sort of take to industry, which hopefully gets better results out in the field. It's really rewarding when agronomists or growers pick up the phone and go, hey, try this. And you know what? It actually worked.

00:06:29:27 - 00:06:41:09

Hilary Sims: And what extension methods do you think cut through to growers and agros in a meaningful way in the 21st century, with all the information channels and all the technology we have available?

00:06:41:20 - 00:09:02:20

Mark Congreve: It's not easy is the starting point when it comes to, you know, trying to get cut through. I try to where possible, explain the science as to why I'm making some particular recommendation. A lot of times we're dealing with science. Science is relatively predictable. The problem is we put it into changing environments on a daily basis. So we pretty much know how soil chemistry is going to work, how agricultural herbicides and pesticides are going to work. The challenge we have is we put them into a different environment every time we make a decision on the farm, it's hotter, it's cooler, there's different soil pH, there's different soil moisture. So the environment is changing all the time. And that's where we get variability in our results. If we kept the environment the same year in, year out, we'd have much more consistency in our trial outcomes. So a lot of it's trying to explain the underlying science principles, but in a format that the recipient of that being the grower or the agronomist can package up and understand. I spend lots of my time reading research papers, and often I'm struggling to actually understand what the scientist is actually trying to say here, and how do I take that information, repackage it into a format that the user can then basically understand the principles and then think about, well, how does that principle apply to my particular farming system, then how is the outcome likely to vary based on the conditions that I've got in front of me at the moment? Agronomists don't realise they're doing that, but they are on a daily basis. They're taking a whole heap of information from a whole heap of different sources. I'm only one source of information, and they're then trying to package all that up, put it into a risk management. Growers are all different. Some growers are much more prepared to accept a bit more risk, and other growers don't necessarily want to take that same level of risk. And the agronomist gets to know his growers and he gets to know which ones, you know, you can push the boundaries a little bit more, you know. I guess it's all about trying to package that information into something that users can take on board, understand, and then make decisions based off that information.

00:09:03:01 - 00:09:10:26

Hilary Sims: Not an easy task, but an important one. And lastly, Mark, to wrap up, what interesting projects do you have coming up?

00:09:11:02 - 00:11:00:11

Mark Congreve: I'm doing a lot of work with some of the researchers in particularly the residual carryover and performance of a lot of the pre-emergent herbicides. That's a space that really still needs a fair bit of work. So we've got all sorts of field trials going on at the moment, trying to provide some more understanding of some of the issues that are going on there. Spray application, spray drift management, right to farm. They're all really big important topics that industry is sort of grappling with. We have limited number of extension people operating in that space at the moment. When I was presented this Seed of Light award and I was asked to make a little speech on the night, one of the key messages I tried to deliver was, we really need more extension people in the industry. You know, there's a lot of information that we need to package up and get out there, and more people in the industry would be great. We do our best trying to get across as many topics as we possibly can. But lots of exciting stuff happening. Autonomous spraying is an area which I think is going to absolutely revolutionise weed control over the next five years. It's coming really fast, so that's going to be something that's going to be a major change as some of the innovators in that space and what they're doing with being able to spray all their fields straight after harvest while the harvest operation is still going, and all of the labor on the farm is all dedicated to the harvest operation. The role that autonomous sprayers are playing in that place is just going to really change things. So there's lots of technology coming through, which is pretty exciting. The flip side, if you're spending your life in weed control and herbicides is herbicide resistance is really the big challenge moving forward.

00:11:00:14 - 00:11:04:07

Hilary Sims: Congratulations again, Mark, and thanks very much for speaking with us today.

00:11:04:14 - 00:11:06:01

Mark Congreve: No problems at all. Thank you.

00:11:13:09 - 00:11:29:09

Hilary Sims: That was ICAN Senior consultant Mark Congreve. More information on this topic can be found in the description box of this podcast or online at grdc.com.au. I'm Hilary Sims and you've been listening to a GRDC podcast.