“Despite going through the driest five year period on record in Australia, we've been able to see a 9pc average increase in profit for mixed farmers participating in Grain & Graze program across Australia,” the program’s national co-ordinator, Richard Price, says.

“That is just testament to the resourcefulness of farmers.

"The great thing about mixed farming systems is that you can adapt to different climatic circumstances by adjusting the cropping-animal mix.”

As agriculture sails into waters made stormy by the cross-currents of climate change and soaring input costs, Grain & Graze pinned down diversity as a fundamental principle of farm adaptation.

Diversity starts with the mixed farm, an entity that has often been ignored in the commodity focus of research and lobby organisations, but which is at the heart of farming across southern Australia.

Researchers took a look at some of the enterprise mixes available to mixed farmers, like grazing of winter cereals, and identified the techniques that make these enterprise interactions successful.

Mr Price said that about 20pc of producers in the Murrumbidgee region grazed their cereals before Grain & Graze.

Now about 40pc use the strategy, many for the first time, and are reporting lifts in profits of up to 19pc.

The program also introduced the mixed farming sector to another pre-existing idea, integrated pest management (IPM), with highly encouraging results.

Used extensively in the cotton and broadacre grains sectors, IPM works by encouraging the natural predators of pest insects to operate on the farmer’s behalf.

Cam Nicholson, Grain & Graze’s south-west Victoria regional coordinator, said under IPM, insecticides become a tool of last resort rather than the first thing the farmer reaches for.

In one case monitored by the program, IPM reduced a farm’s insecticide use by 80pc.