2026 Brian Carlin Memorial Lecture by Dr Alison Bentley

The UWA Institute of Agriculture is proud to welcome Dr Alison Bentley to Perth for this exclusive lecture.

All members of the public are invited to attend this exclusive lecture hosted by The UWA Institute of Agriculture. It will be delivered by Dr Alison Bentley Deputy Director (Science) in CSIRO Agriculture and Food, and titled 'Can less be more? Rethinking nitrogen fertiliser use in Australian cereal cropping' at UWA Bayliss Lecture Theatre G33.

About Brian Carlin Memorial Lecture

The Brian Carlin Memorial Lecture honours the legacy of Mr Brian Carlin, a pioneering agriculturalist whose work in set stocking transformed Southwest Western Australian farming. Established after his death in 1966, the memorial fund brings experts in agricultural science to deliver a public lecture and engage with UWA, DAFWA, and local grower groups, linking research with practical application.

This lecture will be held live and in-person. If you cannot attend in-person, then you are invited to watch a recording of this lecture on our YouTube following the event. Check out our channel here.

About the lecturer

Dr Alison Bentley is the Deputy Director (Science) in CSIRO Agriculture and Food, based at Black Mountain in Canberra, Australia. Her scientific background is in genetics and breeding of cereal crops spanning fundamental understanding of plant processes through to the development of field- and farm-level decision support tools. She has primarily worked on wheat and barley and has experience in a range of research environments in Australia, the UK and Mexico.

About the lecture

Nitrogen is essential for plant growth and is limiting in most environments, requiring the use of synthetic fertilisers which have sustained crop yields across the globe for decades. Innovations in the production of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser plus rapidly evolving agronomic crop management practices have underpinned the global importance of crops like wheat in diets and livelihoods.

However, the efficiency of nitrogen fertiliser use in crop production systems remains highly variable: with as little as 30-50% of applied nitrogen used by crops, requiring high inputs to meet crop demands. This inefficiency has many consequences, including economic costs to growers, environmental costs to agriculture and knock on price pressure for consumers. As nitrogen fertiliser costs soar and environmental concerns mount, Australian cereal crop producers need new solutions.

In this talk, Alison Bentley will discuss intersecting strands of research to address the challenge of reducing nitrogen inputs in whilst maintaining productive and resilient wheat crops. This includes the use of novel field-based testing platforms to characterise genetic interactions, testing of new seed technologies, and exploiting Biological Nitrification Inhibition (BNI), the process by which some plants naturally release compounds that reduce nitrogen loss and greenhouse gas emissions and how we can enable our cereal crops to do this within our current farming systems.