Grassland research: goals for the future

Our goal as scientists must be to provide sufficient food for the world’s population, while returning sufficient income for effort to the food producer. It has been established elsewhere in the conference that pasture-based systems can return high milk production per hectare at low input cost, but are limited to highly fertile, temperate regions with evenly dispersed rainfall patterns and moderate maximum and minimum temperatures. There should be two goals of grazing research in the future; to sustain or improve the profitability of current grazing production systems, and to develop plant and animal varieties that allow grazing in currently less suitable environments. Both of these goals can, and will be achieved through improvements in biotechnology.