Alice Butler: From Environmental Science to Soil Tech at DPIRD Without a Farming Background

Alice Butler is 35, and she wasn't sure that still qualified as a young gun. Her career so far suggests it does. She is a research scientist with the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) in Western Australia, and she got there from environmental science and mapping software, with no farming background behind her.

She grew up in Mt Barker, where agriculture was part of daily life. Many of her friends came from farming families or had worked on farms, and she describes it as part of the fabric of that community. After boarding school in Perth, moving to the city for university felt like the natural next step. She completed a Bachelor of Environmental Science at the University of Western Australia.

The turn toward agriculture began with one university unit. It introduced her to spatial science, better known as GIS, or geographical information system, which combines digital maps with data so location-based information can be shown visually. She became interested enough to volunteer with a spatial scientist after graduating, learning the ArcGIS software. Looking back, she wonders whether AI will mean today's students and graduates never have to wrestle with clunky programs the way her cohort did.

That volunteering took her to Esperance in 2014, where she met Nigel Metz of the South East Premium Wheat Growers Association (SEPWA). She then joined DPIRD at Albany in a research agronomy role. Her work there covered small pointed snails, root lesions, nematodes and sclerotinia management. She calls it a great opportunity for someone who hadn't studied agriculture at university.

At 27 she took time off to travel, but the COVID pandemic cut the trip short. She is grateful for the time she had overseas, and she now thinks coming home may have helped her career. She joked that otherwise she could have become a ski bum.

By 2025 she was working part-time as both a precision agriculture consultant and a research scientist. She now works solely as a research scientist with DPIRD in Soil Water and Nutrition, known as SWAN, a collaboration between the department and the Grains Research & Development Corporation. Precision agriculture is still central to the job. She says it is a key part of how soil research is conducted today, through soil survey layers that show how soil types vary, high-resolution satellite imagery for monitoring, and yield data for analysing large trials.

Her current projects sit squarely in that territory. Within SWAN she is looking at amelioration and management options for gravel soils, the impacts of more frequent deep ripping, and the mapping and soil testing needed to manage highly variable soils better.

She says no two days are the same. She likes being outdoors and working with a team, including researchers based in Esperance, DPIRD's soils research group, and university collaborators through organisations such as SoilsWest. She also values doing applied research with growers and industry. Agriculture is complex, she says, and seasonal variability adds to that, so working alongside growers means being asked targeted questions that shape the research focus.

What she credits most is the people. She names mentors Nigel Metz at SEPWA, Jeremy Lemon and Chris Gazey at DPIRD, and Brent Pritchard at Farmanco, and says she has been lucky in who she has learned from. It is the warmth of people in the industry, she says, that makes her encourage others to consider a career in it. The open question her story raises is how tools like satellite imagery and AI will shape the next group of graduates entering soil research.