CSIRO Launches $8 Million Push to Drought-Proof Dryland Farming

01 November 2026, Adelaide, AU: Australia’s national science agency CSIRO has launched a five year, nearly 8 million Australian dollar research program to test whether regenerative farming practices developed largely in Europe can be adapted to work on the older, drier soils of Australia’s grain growing regions.

The program, called STRAP, short for Stress Testing Regenerative Agricultural Practices, began trial plantings this growing season across sites in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, CSIRO said in a release dated October 13, 2026. The project is funded through the Australian government’s Future Drought Fund and brings together CSIRO with ten partner organisations, including the Ag Excellence Alliance and Mallee Sustainable Farming, two regional farming systems groups that manage trial sites on the ground.

Dr Mark Farrell, a principal research scientist at CSIRO and the project’s lead, said the work responds to a gap between what regenerative agriculture research has shown in wetter, younger soil systems overseas and what Australian grain growers actually need. According to CSIRO, Australia’s dryland cropping soils are generally older and more heavily weathered than those in Europe, and rainfall across the grain belt is more variable and less reliable, meaning farming systems built for other climates cannot simply be transplanted onto Australian paddocks.

Testing several practices at once, across real farms

Rather than testing one technique in isolation, STRAP is built to evaluate several regenerative practices side by side under the same conditions, including intercropping two or more species in the same field, using legumes to add nitrogen to the soil naturally instead of relying solely on synthetic fertiliser, trialling alternative fertiliser products, and integrating grazing pasture into what are normally continuous cropping rotations.

The project combines two scales of trial. A set of small, closely controlled plot trials focused on pasture integration will be analysed together with four larger demonstration trials run on commercial scale paddocks, including sites near Balranald in New South Wales and Murrayville in Victoria. Analysing the small plot and demonstration trial data as one combined, multi environment study is intended to help researchers predict how a given practice is likely to perform in a region where it has not been tested directly, rather than requiring a separate trial in every location.

CSIRO said it is also building data systems that link the trial results to artificial intelligence and geospatial mapping tools, with the aim of tracking greenhouse gas emissions, fertiliser and other input use, and the economic risk associated with each practice across the different sites. Jade Rose, a project manager at Ag Excellence Alliance, is working alongside Farrell on coordinating the on ground trial network, while Penny Roberts, a research manager at Mallee Sustainable Farming, is overseeing an intercropping trial as part of the demonstration work.

No results from the trials have been published yet, since planting only began this season and the project is designed to run for five years. The initial release instead details the program’s scope, funding and methodology, which CSIRO frames as a direct response to grower demand for proof that regenerative practices make economic sense before farmers adopt them at scale, rather than research that only measures environmental outcomes.

Testing assumptions, not just technique

Farrell and his CSIRO colleagues argue that practices often promoted as universally beneficial for soil health, such as heavy reliance on cover cropping or no till systems on their own, can perform differently once tested against a harsher and more unpredictable climate than the one in which many regenerative techniques were first developed and popularised. That is the central premise STRAP is built to test: that soil management advice needs to vary by region and by local conditions, rather than follow a single template drawn from research done elsewhere.

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