The Foundation for Arable Research says its foray into Australia last year is paying off.
Foundation chief executive Nick Pyke said the link with Australia enables it to leverage off the much larger investment in cropping research being carried out across the Tasman.
"We have had some involvement in programmes which are quite different for them (Australia) because of the way we grow crops here in New Zealand, so they have learnt from that".
Mr Pyke said it's had a major input into New Zealand work, particularly on things like integrated pest management, understanding the pathotypes of some of the cereal rusts that are in New Zealand.
"In that programme for example we hadn't typed the rust pathotypes for ten years so we didn't really know what we were dealing with until last year when we involved Professor Robert Park from Sydney University in a programme here."
