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Charlie Baldry, a fifth-generation wheat farmer outside Cootamundra in rural New South Wales, kicked a patch of waxy weeds that, left unchecked, could wipe out his crop.

“If it gets away from you, it can wipe out a whole paddock,” he said. “It’s public enemy number one.”

Wimmera Ryegrass is a scourge for Australian wheat farmers. The red-stemmed grass, introduced in the 1880s as grazing fodder, has since spread to more than 8mn hectares of grain crops across the country. It now costs farmers about A$93mn (US$61mn) a year in lost revenue, according to the Grains Research and Development Corp.

It is also among the most resistant to herbicides, according to scientists, with farmers and agribusiness racing to find new chemicals to fight the weed that threatens one of the country’s most important export crops.

That effort has taken on added urgency. Canberra is set to rule by the end of the year on the use of the pesticide paraquat, which is already banned in many countries due to health and environmental concerns. Global opposition to other herbicides such as Bayer’s glyphosate has also grown, including from US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Jack Hogan, an agronomist who works near Cootamundra, said restrictions on paraquat would make life much harder for farmers already struggling with weed resistance.

“If the paddocks are already resistant . . . the paraquat review presents a major challenge,” he said. “It’s pretty scary.”

The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, a regulator, declined to comment.

Farmers have long tried to suppress ryegrass growth by rotating crops and animals, as well as with cocktails of pesticides including paraquat, glyphosate and clethodim. Even a small patch of ryegrass often requires farmers to resort to “double knocking” — or dousing the entire field with two pesticides — which can result in the loss of the entire crop.

“Uncontrolled weeds can easily lead to 40 per cent of losses in a harvest. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to harvest at all,” said Victoria Corless, chief executive of herbicide developer Moa Technology.

Australia’s wheat industry is a major contributor to domestic and global food supplies, and saw an uptake in demand after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Exports are projected to hit A$9.7bn (US$6.4bn) in the 2026 financial year, according to government data.

“Australia plays a critical role in supplying Asia with wheat, and accounts for over a 10th of global wheat exports,” said Dennis Voznesenski, an analyst with Commonwealth Bank and author of War and Wheat. 

But the industry has been suffering what Corless called an “innovation drought” in new herbicides, leaving farmers without new products to combat increasingly resistant “superweeds”.

“Nature will find a way to evolve its defences,” she said. “In agriculture, if you’re not looking at the weeds, you’re in trouble.”

Weed resistance is particularly prevalent in Australia, making the country a useful laboratory for the next generation of herbicides.

Bayer, the German agritech company behind glyphosate, has been testing icafolin-methyl, its first novel herbicide in three decades, in Horsham, Victoria, via a programme with the government-backed GRDC.

It was developed with “CropKey”, a predictive analytics tool that Bayer hopes will speed up pesticide research and development.

“We’re very hopeful the pipeline will deliver products useful for Australia and other countries as well,” said Tony May, head of sales at Bayer’s Australian crop science division.

He noted that the costs and timeline for bringing a new herbicide to market have more than doubled over the past 20 years due to more stringent human and environmental safety regulations.

Moa, meanwhile, is an Oxford university spin-off that tests potential herbicides against prehistoric ancient plant species.

“Australia has more types of weeds that are resistant to herbicides than anywhere else,” said Moa’s head of trials Tom Clark, adding that the country started observing glyphosate resistance three decades before the UK.

The company is also testing “amplifier” products that are added to existing pesticides to improve effectiveness and can be brought to market faster.

In Canowindra, 150km north of Cootamundra, Clark examines the stubble of a canola field to see how ryegrass shoots are reacting to various doses of Moa’s herbicides.

“If you can kill them in Australia then you know you’re doing well,” he said.