The Centre for Sustainable Farming Systems works to increase farm productivity without further degrading water, land and soils. Addressing the challenges posed by climate change and increasing human population, the centre’s research focuses on optimising crop production in rotation with legume pastures, and increasing biological nitrogen fixation while minimising impact on the environment.
The centre’s core research areas
We apply multi and inter-disciplinary research to investigate and understand the health and biosecurity challenges that threaten humans, animals, plants and their shared environment.
Legumes and nitrogen fixation
Legume Rhizobium Sciences focuses on understanding the basic biology of rhizobia-legume symbioses and their application in the field to improve agricultural productivity and sustainability.
We focus on managing grain protein and quality through manipulating organic and fertiliser sources of nitrogen.
Our research also examines integrated weed management, maximise production farming systems based on water use, and minimising biotic threats to production through systems integration.
Building robust land use options
We have a strong focus on developing farming enterprises to suit environmental constraints and conservation agriculture and soil fertility, including rehabilitation of poor or damaged soils.
We also investigate precision and remote data collection technologies and advanced agricultural chemistry.
Consumers, markets, politics and education
We undertake research that assesses consumer concerns, markets and attitudes to different systems of agricultural production, for example. organic versus industrial; rainfed versus irrigated; live export versus manufactured meat.
We also evaluate the environmental consequences of different land uses in the agricultural space.
Professor Murphy is an expert in soil-plant-microbial interactions (rhizosphere engineering). He leads major research programs on the development of sustainable management practices for agricultural farming systems. This includes quantifying soil organic carbon, improving nutrient and water use efficiency, regenerating soil function in degraded agricultural land and monitoring soil quality.
Professor John Howieson is an internationally recognised expert in sustainable agriculture, specialising in the nitrogen fixation of legume crops.
He has led the discovery program for new pasture and forage legumes in Australian agriculture and is currently on the steering committee to put nitrogen fixation to work for smallholder farmers in Africa.
My research focuses on understanding the interaction between soil bacteria (rhizobia) and their legume hosts. Rhizobia are unique in their ability to “fix” atmospheric nitrogen into plant-available nitrogen via their symbiotic association with legumes. In agriculture, when legumes are inoculated with elite rhizobial strains in crop rotations, all the nitrogen demands of the legume and subsequent cereal crops can be met, without the need for energy-expensive and CO2-producing industrially synthesised fertilisers.
Richard Harper is a Professor in the Food Futures Institute. His research is devoted to devising new approaches to soil, water and biodiversity management; an area where globally there are many long-standing and intractable problems. His major focus since 1995 has been on unlocking carbon markets to drive landscape-scale change; this both solving these intractable problems but also dealing with global greenhouse gas emissions and allowing governments and industry to meet their ambitious emissions reduction pledges.
Mr Harrison is an expert in the field of pasture legumes and farming systems, in particular hard seed ecology and applied rhizobiology.
His work on dry land pasture legume systems has seen his involvement in legume breeding, hard seed ecology and farming systems for low-medium rainfall areas of southern Australia. The National Fixation Program (NFP), another national project focuses on increasing sustainable nitrogen fixation from pulse legumes by developing elite rhizobia strains.
