THE agriculture sector breathed a cautious sigh of relief when Joe Hockey handed down the 2014 federal budget.
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The axe swung, but apparently not so hard it badly damaged the tree.
Appearances, however, are deceptive. In the long term, the budget was another of the thousand cuts governments are making to agricultural research, and thus to Australia's future productivity and competitiveness in international markets.
On the one hand, the Coalition giveth, allocating an extra $100 million over four years toward "cutting-edge technology and applied research" for agriculture.
On the other side, it taketh away: key science agencies lost about $200m in the budget.
CSIRO and the Co-operative Research Centre program are not dedicated solely to agriculture, but each has had an enormous impact on the sector. One project undertaken in one CRC, for instance, the development of Meat Standards Australia by the Beef CRC in the late 1990s, was by 2010 estimated to have returned $200m to the beef industry after all costs were accounted for.
One hundred million dollars should be an impressive figure, but it is dwarfed by other even more impressive figures. It is 0.2 per cent of the value of gross farm output (about $48.7 billion in 2010-11); 0.8pc of the $12b for new fighter jets; or 2.8pc of the $3.5b allocated to infrastructure projects in western Sydney.
It's about how much farmers themselves each year contribute to research through research and development corporations - and recall that the federal $100m will be delivered over four years, meaning that delivery will be in the order of $25m a year.
Twenty-five million dollars is less than one per cent of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) 2014 agricultural research budget, and about 0.7 per cent of the investment that US universities alone made in agricultural research in 2013.
This is an unjust comparison: the combined Australian agricultural research spend is a lot more than $25m a year, and the US has a far larger tax base and agricultural sector.
The point, though, is that $25m a year is small change in a competitive global environment.
There is a growing strategic necessity to keep a growing global population fed with dwindling resources. Maintaining the status quo isn't good enough.
At some point, governments will realise the implications of underinvestment in agriculture, but it may already be too late.
The decades of scientific expertise that have been shed from research departments and agencies can't be recovered in a budget.
Australia needs a 21st Century version of the approach taken by mid-20th Century CSIRO, which explored the question of how to make Australian agriculture great.
That requires the funding for free-ranging scientific enquiry that is allowed to go up dry gullies in search of specks of scientific gold.
If future budgets continue to promote infrastructure over science, then all we may succeed in doing is building highways to nowhere.
