Science Week 2017: DPI rice science is all it’s cracked up to be

An image analysis system developed by DPI scientists has given the rice industry an accurate and time-saving procedure to identify grain suitable for sushi and popular puffed rice products.

DPI researcher Mark Talbot said the automated system detects the potential of rice to crack during cooking, speeding up the process and saving labour.

“Heavily cracked rice will turn into mush during the cooking process for sushi and puffed rice, so it’s very important the industry identifies the potential for rice to crack before grain goes to market,” Dr Talbot said.

“Now in use at SunRice, the technology has replaced manual assessment to help to keep consumers happy and protect premiums for growers.

“In the past, cracked grain was assessed by eye - clearly a painstaking and subjective test for thousands of rice grains.” 

MOLECULAR genetics, computer modelling and mathematics might not spring immediately to mind when agriculture and science are used in the same sentence. 

But – in tandem with agronomy, ecology, and biology – DPI chief scientist Dr Phillip Wright says the mission to feed and clothe people requires a broad spectrum of research. 

The Orange-based Dr Wright says the NSW DPI runs more than 1000 projects across 50 or more science areas. 

“It’s really broad, and involves a whole lot of science skills you might not initially associate with agriculture,” he says 

“The other thing that is really good about Australian primary Industries Science and an agency like ours is we’re really focussed on delivering practical outcomes. You know: How do you drive productivity, how do create competitiveness, how do you create good environmental outcomes? 

“It is incredibly challenging – rates of productivity have got to increase year on year around about 2 per cent to be able to keep feeding the population.”

He said it was a partnership between science and the management skills of primary producers that made Australian ag science so successful.  

“One of the other great strengths is the capability to work with a lot of other partners to do it,” Dr Wright said

“The chickpea industry is a good example.

“In the early days it had a lot of problems with diseases… and to address that we worked with a group of partners and GRDC to improve that resistance and improve yield.

“That takes a range of skill sets good agronomy skills, good crop breeding skills, biology, genetics… And that partnership has been successful and we’ve seen the amount of chickpeas increase to about 800,000 hectares in 2016, or 1.4 million tonnes.”