Dr Oddy is an adjunct professor at UNE and his NSW government career spans more than 40 years, mainly with the Department of Primary Industries, where he is a senior principal research scientist.

He's been there so long he's now in a team revising the work he did in the 1970s on drought feeding, and agreed he had gone full circle.

"What happens is: scientists tend to chase new ideas all the time," he said.

"What we don't do is go back often enough and put them back together to revise them, so you come forward with something new again."

Dr Oddy started working with the DPI at the drought unit after the 1965-67 drought.

"It was clear that the feeding recommendations weren't working, so a lot of work was put in to revise those," he said.

"I summarised the work they did in a new system for feeding livestock. To support that, we established a feeds evaluation service which was available to our advisers and to industry."

He said the system provided much better advice on how much to feed and when to feed livestock if drought ever came again.

"And it did," he said, and chuckled.

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He said research was impossible without a team, and he had worked with many good ones over the years.

"I led a team when I was with Meat and Livestock Australia that wound up sequencing the sheep genome," he said.

"That then led onto the genome predictions used by Sheep CRC in their new sheep genetics services."

"I was one of the founding people that led to that international team that ... was about having a genome sequence, so the tools you had for measurement of genetic improvement could be based off the actual structure of the genome."

Dr Oddy also worked in methane mitigation.

"That led to a recent publication with a host of other authors, which revised downwards the methane production for beef cattle, particularly for northern Australia," he said.

"The original estimates were just too high ... not by much, just 10 or 15 per cent."

He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific journal papers, including invited reviews and a book chapter, and well over 100 conference papers and industry reports regularly cited by scientists all over the world.

He described peer review as crucial.

"When you write, you expect other people will look at what you're writing and check it for as much truth as they can determine from what you have written," he said.

"Often it results in the publications being better.

"The science community isn't one man; it's a whole community."

Dr Oddy said it was about "accountability" and "providing community service".

"There is no point doing research if you can't turn it, in the long run, into something people can use," he said.

"For example, that drought feeding stuff that we did in the 70s was recently turned into a free phone app ...

"All we are doing is taking embedded knowledge derived from the scientific community and making it available to those who can use it for practical purposes."

A livestock production expert recognised for his large body of work, including research into sheep genomics, animal nutrition, physiology and genetics in aspects of production in sheep and beef and product quality in beef, Dr Oddy adds the PSM to his 2015 award of the NSW Premier's Prize for Science and Engineering.