The land's bounty should reward Australia once more, and enhance our reputation for disease-free food production with trading partners across the world, overshadowing any lingering concern about long-term sustainability. Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences says crop production will rise to $58.5 billion in 2016–17, about 12 per cent higher than the average value for the past five years.

ABARES forecasts a 7 per cent rise in total winter crop production, which is expected to reach 42.3 million tonnes, largely as a result of an increase in average crop yields. As well, rainfall from August to October is expected to exceed the median rainfall in eastern and northern Australia.

Australian food and fibre exports to China have risen dramatically in recent years, underpinning hopes agriculture will help offset the downturn in mining income. Free trade agreements add to the favourable outlook.

Yet Australia's investment in research and development has been falling since the 1980s, and an alarm bell sounded last month when two varroa mites were discovered in an Asian honey bee hive at the Port of Townsville, Queensland.

The Australian Honey Bee Industry Council said after an inspection a bee expert found it was likely the hive had been there for two years. The council said Asian honey bees could not be eradicated from Australia, so a response was only focused on the varroa mites.

Dr Denis Anderson, a Canberra-based CSIRO scientist at the time, identified and named the varroa mite after 10 years of researching Asian bees. Until recently Australia was the last country in the world to be free of the varroa mite, although experts have always warned it was not a question of if they arrived, but when.

The varroa mite discovery comes at a time when the CSIRO's 701-hectare field station on the ACT-NSW border is to be redeveloped for housing in what ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr says is aimed at propping up the organisation's finances, because the Australian Government is not properly funding the national researcher.

Ecologists and conservationists in Canberra say redeveloping the land for housing will diminish biodiversity, one of the natural antidotes to disease. This underlines a contradiction in Australia: on one hand land managers including farmers are being urged to support a wider range of biodiversity, on the other a major research structure is being disrupted and sold off.

Unnecessary political decisions such as relocating resources out of Canberra, and backtracking on climate research, are time wasting, distracting and risk losing our brightest scientists to competitors overseas.

Record harvests like the one looming remind us of our great natural advantages, of geographic isolation, sound quarantine and clean production.This should be underpinned by independent research, and not only the private sector, that profits from reliance on pesticides that threaten biodiversity, including bees.