Dairy research gets a boost

Australia's dairy industry will milk the rewards from a cash injection of almost $1.3 million from the Geoffrey Gardiner Dairy Foundation.

The money was divvied up between 35 projects across Australia ranging from laboratory-based research into milk proteins to dairy farmer support services.

Announcing the grants recipients, foundation chairman Chris Nixon said host organisations and other funding bodies were expected match the funding in order to amplify the impact of the projects.

"We believe that the projects we have funded have the capacity to help the dairy industry as a whole," Nixon said.

"Topics covered by the projects range from on-farm productivity, milk quality and processing issues to technology transfer and community leadership."

The Gardiner Foundation was established in October 2000 to direct funding into three streams of the sector, namely small projects, major research and development projects and community development.

The money for the fund is derived from the sale of dairy industry owned assets and brands including Big M, Farmhouse, Skinny and Rev.

Recipients of the first round of small projects funding included Deakin University, Victoria's Plant Biotechnology Centre, CSIRO, the University of Melbourne's Institute of Land and Food Resources and School of Dental Science, the National Milk Harvesting Centre, Australian Nuffield Farming Scholars Association in South Australia and Murray Dairy, among others.

Each group receives $25,000 to continue its work, with the funding to be reviewed in three years.

Among the recipients is Deakin University NHMRC research fellow Dr Robin Daly who will use the money for his study into the benefits of milk fortified with calcium and vitamin D in older men.

Daly said his group had already recruited 110 men who suffered low bone density and was aiming for a total of 200 participants before commencing the study.

The trial, which will run for four years, will split the men into two randomised groups, one of which will received fortified milk while the other receives nothing.

Halfway through the study the groups will be swapped over.

Daly said the trial will involve measuring the men's bone density using ultrasound, CT and DEXA, and would also help evaluate the relative accuracy of each method.

The University of Melbourne's School of Dental Science also received $25,000 for further work on its groundbreaking Recaldent recalcification project.

Project leader Dr Laila Huq said the group was now focusing on how the Recaldent compound worked at a molecular level, with a view to identifying other uses for it, potentially outside of dentistry.

She said the money would be used to partly fund a research assistant as well as use of a nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy machine to examine the interaction between a key peptide known to help protect teeth from decay, and calcium phosphate.

Gardiner Foundation director Dr Graham Mitchell said a key aim of the fund was to attract skilled people into dairy research and to help build the research and development capabilities that were already a major contributor to the Australian economy.

"All of the work that we do is in support of the dairy industry with a big emphasis on R&D across farms through to processes, manufacturing and exportation," Mitchell said.

"We have said to the dairy researchers, 'here's a new pot of money, can we do things differently in the area of front-end research to make sure it can be readily picked up by industry here and internationally'."

He said another series of grants for larger projects would be launched by the foundation shortly.