“If you enjoy what you do, you’ll never work another day in your life” (Confucius 551-479 BC)
Dr Robert van de Graaff is an agricultural scientist with over 40 years varied experience of soil survey, land degradation, assessment of soil quality for plant growth, modification of the soil to suit plant needs, environmental investigations, assessment of land for irrigation, wastewater disposal, geochemical behaviour of heavy metals and trace elements in soils, and of associated environmental risks. He has also been involved in teaching and transfer of skills in both developed and developing countries. |
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| Robert practised soil and land resource surveys extensively while being employed by CSIRO (Hunter valley, NSW, and Katherine River – Tipperary Area, NT), and detailed soil mapping at Cornell University (as a summer job with the USDA - Soil Conservation Service in Seneca and Madison Counties, New York) and land system mapping as a senior research officer of the Victorian Soil Conservation Authority (Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula, Gippsland Lakes catchments). These skills were also put to use in Australian and overseas consultancy projects, e.g. AusAID projects in West Timor, in Pakistan, Botswana, China and Malaysia. |
What else is important to Robert?
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Teaching at University and Primary School Level
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For the last fourteen years, Robert van de Graaff (Principal) has been teaching the first-year landscape architecture students at RMIT a basic course on terrain. The course includes introductory geology, natural rock materials, landforms and geomorphology, and soils. The course comes to life as many of the case studies discussed in class come from Robert’s professional experience. Students learn the importance of soils from Robert’s discussion of costly mistakes made by others in the past who failed to take soils seriously. Some students called him the teacher who asks more questions of the students than tells them what’s what. Socrates found this technique extremely efficient in making a person investigate his own beliefs, but in the end it cost him his life! At age 75 this is not a worry for Robert.
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Robert also enjoys talking to kindergarten and primary school kids about soils, compost and growing plants and vegetables. Here too, Socrates is a great help.
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| Pro Bono Consultancies and Society Inputs |
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Robert believes that the Hippocratic Oath, which medical doctors have traditionally honoured for more than 20 centuries by not sending away a patient without treatment if he/she is unable to pay for the service, also applies to environmental experts. Van de Graaff & Associates have on occasion offered their professional services to people without charge or at a very reduced rate.
In past years and again at present, Robert’s participation in the work of Standards Australia and some other more minor activities, such as Whistleblowers Australia, and his current work with the Victorian EPA has been at his own cost and in the service of Soil Science in general, and of the Australian Society of Soil Science Inc. in particular.
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