’Food’ cut into wheat that could make a million pasta packets

Crop mapping plans have taken a back seat to this 'agwork' to focus attention on the Sydney Institute of Agriculture's key message as part of the inaugural National Agriculture Day, which is focussed on all things food. It took a plane to capture the GPS precision harvesting in the field of wheat but the message is clear: FOOD! is the Sydney Institute of Agriculture's focus for National Agriculture Day, writ large - or precisely 216m wide and 60m high. The FOOD! for thought does not come without a cost - the food art will impact on the crop mapping on the 280ha paddock. This is a small price to pay, say the 'agvocates', when considering what's at stake - on this property alone the crop is expected to produce 840 tonnes of durum wheat - the equivalent of about one million packets of pasta; research underway is looking at the potential for heatand drought tolerance using natural breeding techniques. "I was talking with our cropping supervisor Kieran Shephard and we came up with the idea of cutting the word FOOD into the wheat which we were about to harvest - after all, agriculture is all about food production," explained Dr Guy Roth, the director of northern agriculture at the University's Narrabri crop research campus. "The word food is only four letters, and we managed that with our state-of-the-art 12m-wide header; Kieran put the metrics into the header's high-tech navigation system and harvested the letters.