Adapting Agriculture To Climate

Change
The strong changes in the climate is clearly evident and the probability of further
changes occurring give urgency to addressing the agricultural adaptation more
coherently. we are having to address the changing the minds of consumers for food
and all of those other issues that determine the objectives about plan improvement
programs but by really climate change really seems to be to be the overarching issue
that's driving a lot of what we have to do in in genic proper genex today and it's really
an issue I'd like to explore it from a number of different dimensions like to take us right
back to the beginnings of Agriculture because I think the evidence is that the
agriculture was invented as a response to the climate change that at the time we had a
very rapidly warming environment and in that photo present area and this is wild barley
that I photographed near the Citadel in in a weapon and it's growing on the walls of the
city Ellis before it was born recently I think this is what we believe was the first plant
domesticated around 10,000 years ago and this was the beginnings of Agriculture
where human society spend together and greater performance settlements and so this
is at least a classical view of where agriculture was driven by the necessity to produce
food in a drawing environment worthy together my methods of food production. the
debating bodies were much more closely related to the wild event violence than they
were to be wild violets from the Middle East where barley at first being domesticated
this this was part of what became a popular argument that maybe there was a
secondary domestication of filing in Tibet this was particularly popular in China and
should be spec there was a there was a real interest in this and it's it's great to think
now we've actually finally resolved what happened while sequencing everything and
really looking closely I hate the Germans of these species and what to cut to the
answer what we found was that Bali really was just the mr.kvr originally in the Fertile
present back 10,000 years ago spread out from there when it came East it went
through India five or six thousand years ago where agriculture was what quiet well
develops and moved up through Nepal into bath into the Himalayas going through a
genetic bottleneck because because of the cold temperatures only a small proportion
of the population survived at those high temperatures and then after a period of
cultivation there escaped into the wild so the wild barley is its best we believe our
escapes from the domesticus rather than the other way around we can see that by
analysing very carefully the genic sequence of a number of the kilo so they're involved
in the mutations associated domestication and then moving back into the wild so it
shows how how we can actually unpick the history of agriculture by really looking at a
great detail and what actually happened and that's been fitted in now with a lot of the
archaeological evidence and so will recently we've turned our attention back to
Australia because I've been working now with our local archaeologists and really
revisiting the questions of agricultural origins in Australia and there does seem to be
this very substantial body of evidence for what we would possibly call or probably call
agriculture in Australia a very long time ago and it's just remotely possible in agriculture
happened here first we really don't know before so we're looking at a whole lot of lines
of evidence mostly ideological but we're interested in starting with the plants
themselves and how they may have been impacted in Australia by this very long period
of human habitation here in Australia where plants animals and humans have
interacted over extraordinary period of time probably more in the one environment than
anywhere else in the world and develop very sophisticated food production systems
but involved all sorts of complaining harvesting storage transport and processing
particularly of grain this this here in Central Australia is what we think was the sort of
Grain Belt the climate was a little bit more favourable just even a thousand years ago
and we think three to five thousand years ago we've got a lot of archaeological sites
this one here particularly excites me where we've got mining on a large scale grinding
stones this is the large scale quarry used the grinding stone manufacture for
processing grain this is about three to five thousand years old so there's a really long
history of grain processing utilisation of country we've just started doing teas and a lot
of that is going to I think be be able to be critically analysed but looking like more of
the genomics of those it's very early but those populations that exist in Australia
interestingly in this area we think that in the channel country we're focusing we think
that there were two big industries a few thousand years ago the grain trade and there's
not quite straight because naxaiites was sourced from that area and that was the
source of wealth for people in these areas Trading agricultural commodities with with
other groups to the east for example to group different types of crops so there's a
whole new area ripening up of looking at agricultural Australian agriculture and I think
what what this will do is give us a whole lot more underst how we can work with
agriculture in the Australian environment.