AgResearch restructure plans criticised

He was commenting on a proposal by AgResearch to make 83 of its scientists redundant and to hire just 27 others to replace them -- a net loss of 56 jobs.

Allison says in whole areas of agriculture AgResearch now has no capability. He says it claims dairy fertility is a priority, but notes that the best scientist in this field resigned and went back to Canada.

"At one stage AgResearch was proudly telling a parliamentary select committee about material its staff had published in the prestigious science journal Nature, which was great," he told Rural News. "But what they didn't tell the committee was that they fired two out of the three authors of one of the papers within the year, so what does that tell you?"

Allison is also highly critical of Science and Innovation Minister Steven Joyce's defence of AgResearch, in which he claimed the CRI was doing what the farming industry wanted. Allison says this is "absolute nonsense".

"AgResearch is substantially reducing research into animal health, parasitology and immunology and yet they are [not reducing] areas of social science, which will provide nothing to the industry. They say they are going to concentrate on farm systems, whatever that means.

"One might cynically think that increasing farm systems research means a whole lot of scientists running around with laptops trying to figure out where all the information goes. It is absolutely dismaying really."

Allison questions the wisdom of AgResearch putting $10 million into a demonstration dairy farm in Southland. He believes that money could have been better spent retaining the scientists they are planning to make redundant.

He also criticises what he describes as a disastrously top-heavy management structure, which increases the CRI's overhead costs.

Compounding AgResearch's problems is the science funding system, which is broken, Allison says.

"We have national science challenges -- an effort to try to prescribe the areas of research. But I haven't heard anyone say a good thing about the national science challenges.

"There are some 14 areas for which scientists must bid to get funding and the whole thing is a terrible mess. The amount of time spent writing bids is enormous. When I was a research director, scientists spent very little time bidding.

"They had to write project proposals to get money from their research directors and they were reviewed within the organisation. But nowadays these guys are spending 20-30% of their time looking for money and from what I have heard only one bid in ten is successful."

Allison says extension work with farmers in AgResearch is virtually non-existent and he believes some people in the organisation wouldn't know what a farmer looked like. This is a far cry from the days when he was the boss at Invermay research station when up to 2000 people would turn up for a field day.