Agricultural modeller - Neil Huth |
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When farmers make decisions about cultivating their land, planting crops, running livestock or using fertilisers, they call on their years of experience in farming and increasingly nowadays their own formal education in agriculture. They can also enlist the help of computers. For some years now, scientists like me have been developing computer programs to help farmers make decisions about how to manage their farms. I started out wanting to be a high school science teacher, but later decided research would be more fun. Then I got interested in computers, and added a graduate diploma in computing to my Bachelor of Applied Science degree. Using my computer, I can show farmers the effect of using more fertiliser on their sugarcane, or what would have happened if they had planted cotton instead of sorghum last season. We can develop a new farming system on a computer and run it for 100 years or so - in the space of an afternoon. Producing a good computer model requires a lot of information, so as well as gazing at a computer screen, I spend time out in the field, digging holes, harvesting plants and bringing samples back to the laboratory for analysis. Our work helps farmers manage their use of fertilisers or make the most of scarce rainfall. It also helps the politicians understand just how bad a drought can be for farmers. The computer models we have been developing at the CSIRO Division of Tropical Agriculture in Brisbane can assist people in dry countries such as Kenya and Zimbabwe grow food without compromising soil fertility or increasing soil erosion. I travelled to Kenya recently to help train local scientists to use our programs.
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This work is reproduced from the Women in Science Enquiry Network "Science Futures" was produced by Wisenet with the aid of a grant from the Department of Industry, Science and Tourism Science and Technology Awareness Program. |