Read what the government is actually building
The precision dependency trap, and why Earthfood exists
There is a change happening in agriculture that is much bigger than drones, AI or the latest precision sprayer.
We are steadily moving biological function off the farm and replacing it with management.
When soil no longer holds water, we manage irrigation harder. When nutrients stop cycling properly, we buy more soluble inputs. When plants become susceptible, we reach for another treatment. When weeds or insects appear, we identify, map, predict and target them. When resistance develops, we look for a more precise weapon.
Now the machinery around that approach is becoming extraordinary. Satellites can watch paddocks. Drones can monitor and intervene. Sensors can watch animals, water and soil. Artificial intelligence can analyse the data. Molecular diagnostics can identify organisms. RNA interference can regulate gene activity. Biological inventions can be patented and licensed.
Some of those tools will be useful. That is not the argument.
The question is what sort of agriculture we are building.
Because every biological function we allow to disappear from the farm becomes another product, sensor, algorithm, licence or intervention someone can sell back to the farmer.
That is the part I think we need to talk about.
And it is one of the reasons Earthfood exists.
Read what the government is actually building
You do not need a conspiracy theory to see the direction. The Australian Government has written it down.
Its Delivering Ag2030 framework says Australia should modernise its agricultural innovation system and accelerate commercialisation and uptake of innovation. It records around $800 million a year going through the Rural Research and Development Corporations, including more than $500 million raised from producer levies and more than $300 million in government matched funding.
The same government document says fully implementing digital agriculture could increase Australian agricultural production by $20.3 billion a year.
Then read the Australian Government's Digital Foundations for Agriculture Strategy.
Artificial intelligence. Robotics. Automated machinery. Satellites. Remote sensing. Connected livestock sensors. Movement tracking. Blockchain traceability. Drones carrying out remote monitoring and intervention.
This is not speculation about where agriculture might go one day. It is an Australian Government strategy describing the technological direction already being built.
Ag2030 does not contain a neat shopping list saying RNAi, PCR, drones, patents and predictive models will together become the new agricultural control system.
It does not have to. Read Ag2030 beside Digital Foundations. Then look at what Australia's national science agency is developing and putting into its commercialisation pipeline. The direction becomes fairly obvious.
Then you arrive at RNA interference
CSIRO is currently offering an agricultural technology called RNAi MkII through its commercialisation marketplace.
CSIRO describes it as a way of regulating gene activity for crop protection and trait modification. It specifically identifies insect and weed control as possible applications.
A provisional patent has been filed. CSIRO is seeking licensing, investment, joint venture and partnership opportunities. Think about what that means.
We are moving into the commercialisation of control over biological processes themselves.
CSIRO openly describes its broader commercialisation machinery too. It can license intellectual property for royalties or equity, sell IP outright, create collaborative ventures, establish spin-outs and enter other commercial structures. CSIRO says it is Australia's largest patent holder and reported hundreds of active licences and tens of millions of dollars in licensing revenue.
Again, the point is not that patents are evil. The point is that agriculture is entering a world where biological functions can become intellectual property. Farmers need to understand what that means.
Australia does allow biological inventions to be patented.
This part is not internet folklore either. IP Australia says certain biological materials can be patented where they have been isolated from their natural environment or produced synthetically or recombinantly.
Its own examples include isolated bacteria, fungi, algae and viruses, compositions of microorganisms, genetic engineering processes and genetically or phenotypically modified bacteria, cells, plants and non-human organisms.
IP Australia also says naturally occurring biological material sitting in nature is not simply patentable because somebody discovered it. Technical intervention matters.
That distinction matters enormously. Nature itself is not somebody's invention.
But isolate it, technically intervene, create something meeting patent requirements, build a commercial application around it, and suddenly we are in a completely different legal and economic world. That is already happening around agriculture.
So here is a question farmers should be asking far more often:
Who owns the biology we are going to depend on?
Not just who manufactures the drum. Who owns the organism, the modification, the process, the data, the diagnostic system, the licence or the technology that makes the whole thing work?
And what exactly did Australia sign with the United Nations?
The Convention on Biological Diversity is also worth reading rather than repeating what either side says about it.
It does not give pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies a blank cheque to walk into Australia and take whatever organism they like.
Article 15 says countries retain sovereign rights over their genetic resources and that access is subject to national legislation. Where access is granted, it refers to prior informed consent, mutually agreed terms and fair sharing of benefits arising from commercial use.
But the Convention absolutely does put genetic resources, biotechnology, access and benefit sharing into an international framework.
Article 19 specifically deals with biotechnology developed from genetic resources and the distribution of resulting benefits.
That is worth understanding because biological resources now have value far beyond conservation.
A bacterium can contain a useful pathway. A fungus can produce a compound. An insect may contain a useful genetic mechanism. A plant can carry characteristics somebody wants to reproduce.
A microorganism can perform a commercially valuable biological function. Biological diversity is also biological information. And biological information increasingly has a market value.
Meanwhile, in the ground on the farm.
Here is where I think we have lost perspective. Functional living stable soil already contains an astonishing biological workforce.
Microorganisms participate in nitrogen transformation, nutrient cycling, decomposition, mineral availability, root interactions, carbon cycling, soil aggregation and the endless recycling of material through a living system.
Fungi extend through soil. Roots release compounds into the rhizosphere. Microbes produce sticky extracellular materials that help bind particles. Predators consume other organisms and nutrients move again. Water moves through pore spaces that biological activity helps create and maintain.
Plants feed organisms and organisms feed processes that support plants. It is complicated beyond anything we currently know how to manufacture.
Yet agriculture has spent decades stripping functions out of that system and then congratulating itself for becoming increasingly sophisticated at replacing them. That is the part I cannot get past.
We call the replacement technology progress while rarely putting a price on the biological function that disappeared.
The precision dependency trap
I am calling this precision dependency.
Precision itself is not the problem. If a drone lets a farmer treat ten weeds instead of spraying an entire paddock, good. If a diagnostic tool identifies a dangerous disease quickly, use it. If a sensor prevents irrigation waste, excellent.
Precision dependency begins when the farming system itself becomes progressively less capable without the technology surrounding it. That deserves a very simple test.
After I use this technology, is my farm more capable of functioning on its own, or have I simply become better at managing its dysfunction?
A soil-moisture sensor can tell you the paddock is drying out. It cannot make sand hold more water.
A laboratory can tell you a nutrient is deficient. It does not necessarily restore the biology that cycles that nutrient.
A PCR test can identify an organism. It does not automatically restore the ecological competition that helps keep biological populations in balance.
A precision pesticide may target an insect far more accurately. It does not answer why the plant was vulnerable enough for the insect to become a major problem.
A gene-silencing technology may become an extraordinarily effective tool. It still represents another external intervention into a biological system.
The more biological function we replace with management, the more management the farm requires. That is not resilience.
This is why Earthfood is outside this circus
Earthfood was never designed around a single engineered organism performing one patented task. We did not start with the question, "What organism can we alter so we can sell farmers a new function?"
We started with soil. What is missing? What is no longer cycling? Why are minerals present but unavailable? Why does water disappear?
Why has soil lost structure? Why are roots struggling? Why is organic material not being processed properly? Why does the farmer need another product to compensate for something biology once did?
Earthfood exists to put a broad living microbial workforce back into that conversation. That does not make Earthfood primitive. Quite the opposite.
It means we are working with a biological system instead of assuming we should redesign every individual component of it.
"I am increasingly convinced that this distinction is going to become one of the defining agricultural arguments of the next decade. Do we keep engineering more precise ways to manage failing biological systems, or do we invest seriously in restoring their ability to function?" Bronwyn Holm, Founder, Earthfood
Now follow the public money!!!
This is where my patience starts to wear thin. Australian farmers pay research levies. Taxpayers contribute additional money. Government channels hundreds of millions of dollars through agricultural research and innovation systems.
Some of that research becomes intellectual property. Some is licensed. Some becomes a commercial product. Some is put into joint ventures or spin-out companies.
There may be excellent reasons for every one of those arrangements, but farmers should be asking who ultimately owns what they helped fund and what return comes back to them.
More importantly, why does a laboratory proposal so often fit the funding system more easily than an Australian company saying:
We already have the biology. Put it in a paddock and test it properly. (Our product has been commercially available for over 40 years!).
The answer is partly structural. Universities and major research bodies employ people to build grants, administer projects, produce papers, manage contracts and navigate government funding.
A family business spends its time making product, answering farmers, packing orders, paying freight and trying to stay alive long enough to prove what it already knows from the field. Those are not equal starting positions.
But here is the part that changes things for Earthfood.
Government has already funded this model
The Australian Government's Future Drought Fund has already paid for farmers to demonstrate biological fertilisers.
One published project received $712,707 to run biological fertiliser demonstrations on ten farms in central and western Victoria, together with farmer education, workshops, webinars and broader national promotion. The stated objectives included improving soil water-holding capacity, fertiliser efficiency and stable soil organic matter.
Other government drought-resilience programs have funded trials and demonstrations involving biofertiliser application as part of improving agricultural resilience.
So there is no need for Earthfood to go cap in hand asking whether government is allowed to support biological agriculture. They already do. The question now becomes much sharper.
If the Australian Government is prepared to spend $712,707 demonstrating biological fertilisers on ten farms, why shouldn't an Australian-made, certified living microbial system be put through the same process? Not given a cheque because we tell a good story. Tested. AND PROPERLY.
Give us the paddocks
I do not want a laboratory pot with perfect soil and three plants sitting under controlled lighting. Give Earthfood real farms.
Western Australian sand.
Queensland clay.
Riverina cropping country.
Horticulture.
Grazing country.
Degraded soil.
Country that has carried decades of fertiliser and chemical inputs.
Measure it before Earthfood goes on.
Measure infiltration. Soil structure. Aggregation. Root development. Nutrient availability. Moisture behaviour. Inputs. Plant response. Yield where appropriate.
Keep untreated comparison areas where the trial design permits it.
Then measure it again.
Bring independent scientists if government requires them. Bring universities. Bring grower groups. Bring farmers who do not believe a word I say.
I don't care.
Measure it.
If Earthfood does nothing, publish that.
If Earthfood changes the soil, publish that too.
Then ask what it costs per hectare compared with the growing pile of technologies being designed to manage the consequences of biological dysfunction.
That is a research project worth public money.
There is a much bigger argument here
I think agriculture is approaching a fork in the road. One path leads toward extraordinary precision.
We will know more about every plant, insect, organism, water molecule, nutrient and patch of soil than farmers could have imagined a generation ago.
But knowledge and control are not the same thing as biological health.
A farm connected to satellites, drones, artificial intelligence, patented biological technologies and constant diagnostic surveillance could be technologically brilliant and biologically exhausted at exactly the same time.
That is the danger. The farm that cannot function without a dashboard is not resilient. Resilience is what remains working when the dashboard goes dark.
The soil still has to cycle nutrients. Roots still have to find water. Microbes still have to process organic matter. Plants still have to interact with the biological world around them.
Rain still has to enter the ground. Minerals still have to become available. No algorithm changes that.
So yes, Earthfood is outside the circus
We are going in the other direction. Build the biological workforce.
Build soil structure. Put nutrient cycling back to work.
Put microbial activity around roots. Build the conditions in which water and minerals can be used better.
Reduce the number of jobs the farmer has to keep buying back from outside the farm.
That does not mean throwing away technology.
It means remembering what the technology is supposed to serve.
Agriculture should be using technology to help functioning farms, not using ever more technology to keep dysfunctional biology on life support.
That is the line I think Australian agriculture has to confront.
And if government genuinely wants drought resilience, productivity, better nutrient efficiency and healthier Australian soils, then Earthfood has a simple proposal.
Stop talking about soil biology as though it is still waiting to be invented.
Give us the farms.
Give us the independent measurements.
Let the living system show you what it can do.
Come with me and get the farm you dreamed, naturally better.
https://yourearthfood.com.au/pages/soil-health-assessment
Bronwyn Holm, Founder, Earthfood®
Farmers' Friend • Gardeners' Guide • Soil Advocate • Growers' Voice