If you work in agriculture, you’ve heard the term Agrifood. Sometimes it’s used interchangeably with agriculture - but should it be? Yes, a major output of agriculture is food, but try telling the thoroughbred industry they’re part of the agrifood industry and watch them rear up. It might also stitch-up wool and cotton producers. And what about wheat used for ethanol or canolashipped to Europe for biodiesel? Further fuel to the fire.
In fact, the largest use of global agricultural production -by a country mile - is animal feed, not human food (more on that here).
But highest volume doesn’t equal highest value per tonne. Human food generally commands a premium and, if you ever need political or social brownie points, it’s worth reminding people that if they want breakfast tomorrow, they’ll need agriculture today.
Yet the rise of Agrifood as a catch‑all brand has had an unintended consequence: a persistent belief that R&D investment should chase food functionality, even when the market fundamentals say otherwise.
Let’s steer our attention to grain - the backbone of both human and animal nutrition.
Lupin
Lupins are a great local example of chasing the food premium dream. Whether exported or used domestically, the vast majority of WA lupins end up as animal feed.
Decades of investment - breeding for lower alkaloids, research into cook-ability and marketing campaigns about nutritional benefits -have barely moved the needle, lupin food remains a niche product.
From a market analysis perspective, this isn’t shocking. Lentils, chickpeas, field peas, soybeans and faba beans dominate global pulse consumption and have similar functionality and nutritional profile. They’re familiar, widely available, and deeply embedded in cultural cuisines. Competing against established staples is like trying to convince Australians to flick lettuce out of their salad mix and replace it with dandelion leaves. Possible, but….yeah nah.
Barley
Barley has two main uses: malting (mostly for beer) and animal feed. For decades, WA growers hoped their crop would “go malt” because the premium was attractive — the old rule of thumb was about $50 per tonne.
For the last year and a half, the premium has been so small as to be almost irrelevant, but the costs of achieving malt specs keep rising. Feed barley can be used for malting when the price is right (mainly China), and malt barley can be fed to livestock when feed demand pushes prices up. The lines have blurred to one of shrugging indifference.
Despite this, R&D investment still leans heavily toward achieving malting spec traits — protein levels, diastatic power, germination uniformity, fermentability, enzyme profiles. It’s complex and expensive.
Meanwhile, far less Big R research effort (i.e. none) goes into understanding barley’s genetic performance as feed: e.g.
Given that the majority of WA barley ends up in an animal, is this is a missed opportunity? A 5% improvement in feed conversion across ~5million tonnes of feed barley is worth far more than a $5 per tonne premium for malt.
The pursuit of premium has overshadowed the pursuit of profitability. Fit‑for‑purpose feed varieties that improve animal performance may create more value than feed grades – particularly if yields are higher, and input costs lower, without the need to meet food standards. If new breeds consistently deliver better feed outcomes, it's likely that market forces will reward it. (We saw this once before with Wandering oats – probably the only premium feed segregation seen in WA).
If you grow grain, next time someone asks what industry you work in, it could be strategic, and certainly more accurate, to say AgriFEED and maybe the pendulum might swing back a bit.
Breakfast still matters, of course, but so does everything that eats grain before it becomes breakfast.
