Kath Cooper

Dr Kath Cooper was an English-born Australian plant breeder whose four-decade career made her one of the country's leading figures in triticale, the wheat-rye hybrid grown for grain and forage on difficult soils. Working first at the University of Adelaide's Waite Institute and later as an independent breeder and seed grower on a farm at Sherlock in the South Australian Mallee, she released a long run of varieties adapted to dryland farming and kept affordable pure seed available when public research funding for the crop had largely dried up. Farm-press obituaries in October 2026 reported that she died aged 72, shortly after retiring from 43 years of triticale work.

Cooper arrived in Australia from the United Kingdom via Canada in January 1982 on a two-year temporary visa. Her Waite Institute project, supported by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, aimed to create new triticale germplasm with better drought tolerance for South Australia's marginal districts. She proved adept at crossing wheat and rye and at the laboratory steps that produce primary triticales; within two years she had generated hundreds of new first-generation lines from thousands of crosses, then combined them with advanced CIMMYT introductions from Mexico. When a new pathotype of wheat stem rust appeared in Queensland and rendered most commercial triticales susceptible, University of Sydney testing showed that about nine in ten of her new lines were resistant, and her funding was renewed.

By the mid-1980s she was effectively running Australia's national triticale breeding effort after her supervisor, Professor Colin Driscoll, left for a post in Oman on the eve of the International Triticale Symposium in Sydney. Cooper delivered the keynote on the national programme, presented her own work, and even baked triticale wholemeal foods for the meeting, having already self-published The Australian Triticale Cookery Book in 1984 to promote the grain. Money remained scarce. She and a single technician sometimes harvested trials for other groups in exchange for fuel and truck hire, and she cycled to trial sites and field days to stretch thin budgets. Funding from the Grains Research and Development Corporation began in 1992, the year she released her first variety, Abacus, and also brought the rye variety Bevy to release. Wet-season performance of long-season Abacus impressed growers, and further releases followed, including Credit, Speedee, Treat and Tickit, plus Yukuri from CIMMYT material and Rufus from the University of New England.

When the University of Adelaide closed the triticale programme in 2004 and handed material to Australian Grain Technologies, Cooper and her long-time technician and partner Mike Elleway bought a grain and sheep farm at Sherlock. They grew pure seed for companies, spotted useful off-types, and for another two decades selected and crossed in the paddock. Farm-bred varieties including Tuckerbox, Yowie, Goanna, Wonambi, Joey, Razoo and Woomera found buyers for forage, grain and horticultural use. In 2017 she received the David Roget Mallee Sustainable Farming Excellence Award for her contribution to sustainable dryland systems. Machine-dressed, non-PBR seed from her work continued to be offered from Sherlock and Keith after her death. Exact day of death was not stated in the Stock Journal and The Land tributes published on 1 October 2026; those reports said she had recently retired and passed away shortly afterwards, aged 72. Cause of death was not publicly given.