Magic dirt

Soil researcher Dr Ehsan Tavakkoli has a serious case of job satisfaction. 

The Senior Mortlock Fellow at the University of Adelaide’s School of Agriculture, Food and Wine spends his days researching the interactions between carbon and nutrient geochemistry in agricultural systems. Ehsan was born in Iran and moved to Australia in 2005 to continue his studies. After completing his Master of Science in Agriculture at the University of New England in New South Wales, he moved to Adelaide in 2007 to pursue his PhD at Waite. 

“I was lucky to be funded by the Grains Research and Development Cooperation (GRDC) for a scholarship,” he says. “Working at Waite campus is not a nine-to-five job. It’s all about passion.” 

Ehsan has plenty of passion. Anyone working in soil research does. They have the potential to change the world we live in, and it is a responsibility they take seriously. 

“We are sitting in one of the most influential locations in the world,” Ehsan says, as he settles in for a chat at Waite’s Beltana Café. “It has produced so much practical knowledge towards advancement of agriculture and environmental and food production. The campus includes the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine’s co-located partners, such as CSIRO, SARDI, the Australian Wine Research Institute, and plant phenomic facilities. 

“Over the past 100 years, they have collectively made significant contributions towards improving the productivity and sustainability of agriculture in Australia – and globally.” 

Ehsan and his peers carry our future on their shoulders through their research. “My real interest is to come up with technology that can be adopted by farmers to improve their productivity, sustainability, and eventually impact the Australian economy,” he says. “A back-of-an-envelope calculation shows that every year, across the northern, southern and western part of the country, we lose about $3.4 billion by not unlocking the potential that remains in soil.”

Fortunately, the brains trust at Waite is powerful.

“I’ve been exposed to some of the best scientists and academics that you can wish for,” Ehsan says. “One of the people that really changed my life was Associate Professor Glenn McDonald, a plant scientist who still works here.”

Another source of inspiration was Professor Peter Anderson, a chemist who applied his knowledge of chemistry to the environment.

“There’s a lot of rapid changes in chemistry, and chemical engineering in bacterial science,” Ehsan says. “Agriculture is often really traditional, but the innovation here is to adopt the latest advances in nanotechnology and the latest advances in chemical engineering, to come up with innovation for agriculture.”

To Ehsan, no work could be more important. “When you think about agricultural soils in Australia, more than 75 per cent of our soils are suffering from one, or more than one problem,” he says. “Approximately 98.8 per cent of our food comes directly from soil. That is significant.”

Professor Michael McLaughlin researches soil and environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology, risk assessment, food quality, crop nutrition and fertiliser technology. He also travelled to Australia to complete his PhD, after studying in his homeland of Ireland, and in the UK and South Africa.

“I came to Australia because of Waite’s reputation in soil science,” he says. “I did my PhD at Waite and worked for CSIRO for many years, before joining the University in 2004. I’ve worked a lot on soil contamination by heavy metals, how they get into soil and trying to come up with environmental regulations to safely use fertilisers on soil.” 

Michael describes himself as a soil chemist. “I’ve used chemistry in both the contamination areas and the soil fertility area,” he says. “More recently, it’s almost verging into engineering, where we got into a relationship with a major multinational fertiliser company [Mosaic] in 2004. Since then, we’ve been helping them develop new products to reduce environmental losses of nutrients to waterways or to the air, and to improve crop recovery of nutrients that we apply to the land.”

In a research career spanning more than four decades, Michael has seen it all. He says the advent of modern instrumentation has totally transformed the way soil science research is conducted. He describes the global “mood shift” as heartening.

“Particularly in the last five years, the World Health Organization Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have really done a lot to improve the understanding of the importance of soils,” Michael says. “Social media is helping to educate a lot of people in cities about the importance of soil science, through LinkedIn, X, and Facebook, and in Australia we’ve been really lucky to have a national soils advocate, set up by the government.

“The Soil Science Society has really engaged with the National Soils Initiative, and through those new communication channels, I think a lot more people in urban areas now understand about soil.”

Forward thinking is also a major part of Research Fellow Dr Thomas Lines’ work. Thomas is currently focusing on the complex interactions between under-vine cover crops, soil health and perennial horticulture crops.

“I’m trying to understand how different cover cropping mixes influence almond orchards,” he says. “We’ve got one trial site in Loxton in the Riverland and one near Griffith in New South Wales. We’re putting a lot of money into sensors at our primary site in the Riverland, and we’re gearing up for a lot of data collection over the next few years.” 

Thomas’s work includes industry outreach. 

“The general angle is that farmers and growers need to think about the decisions they’re making that influence the soil,” he says. “You don’t have to maintain really tight control over everything by using heaps of herbicides; instead, you can have groundcovers and if you select a good mix of species and allow them to establish an ecosystem, you can get a lot of benefits without the downsides traditionally ascribed to having weeds in a vineyard or orchard.” 

It’s a long game. 

“It’s really tricky. For almonds, their lifespan is 30 years, so if you want to make a big change, you don’t want to pull the trees out and start again. Having said that, almond growers are extremely interested in developments and better ways of doing things,” Thomas says. “Fundamentally, if you’ve got roots in the ground, as opposed to bare earth, then those plants are putting beneficial compounds into the soil and building life there. If you have life in the ground, it has the capacity to help the other plants; it provides habitat for fungi and microbes.” 

On the whole, Thomas is optimistic about the direction in which Australian agriculture is going. “It’s a real gear change to shift from controlling a thing to within an inch of its life – almost like a ‘hydroponics in the soil’ sort of system – to a place where you’re working with an ecosystem rather than against it,” he says. 

Nearby, the team at the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) is also focused on future-proofing. Associate Professor Ben Sparrow, Program Lead of TERN’s Ecosystem Surveillance Research Infrastructure, leads a team of approximately 30 people devoted to collecting data for scientists. The result is a comprehensive national soil library of sorts, stored in a large shed, tucked away on the Waite campus. 

The samples were meticulously collected over more than 10 years, and the world-class research infrastructure helps scientists monitor changes to the environment and climate. The volume of samples is astounding. 

“My team here works on monitoring changes to Australian environments by collecting standardised information on soil and vegetation from across the whole continent,” Ben says. “We’ve enabled some pretty amazing research using the samples and data that we’ve collected. The idea is that anyone can access the data online, or apply to use our physical samples – from academics to land managers.” 

The important work also helps to enable predictions of future risks. 

“It’s not about what we find, it’s more about what we enable others to find,” Ben says. “I’m one of the earlier employees on the team, and I was really involved with helping design what we do and what we measure. I get a fair bit of satisfaction when people use the data or the samples we have collected for things you never intended, especially when they find some really exciting results.” 

Though there are problems to be solved and potential to be unlocked, the future of Australian soil is in good hands at the Waite. 

“Some of the best global talent has studied here or are still here educating the next generation of people,” Ehsan says. “They are the next generation and arrive with ideas, enthusiasm, and a hardworking attitude.” 

Written by Katie Spain

Photography by University of Adelaide and Nicolas Rakotopare