Water Use Efficiency

Water Use Efficient Farming Systems for the Mallee is a four year project (2009 – 2013) funded by GRDC and forms part of a bigger national project looking at water use efficiency in the cropping belt regions of Australia. The project is a collaboration between CSIRO, Vic DPI, Mallee Focus and MSF with support from Low Rainfall Collaboration Project, Rural Solutions SA and the South Australian Murray Darling Basin Natural Resource Management Board.

Objective
Over the past decade, significant advances have been achieved in water use efficiency for cropping systems based on intensive cereal growing using no-till farming. This project aims to further improve whole-of-farm water use efficiency across the 6 million hectares of Victorian, South Australian and NSW Mallee over the next 4 years by 10%.

This will be achieved in two ways:
• by addressing the many challenges of sustainability such as grass weed problems, disease, fertiliser uptake, season variability and variability in Mallee farming systems; and
• by developing and adapting new strategies that are suited to a wide range of soil types and land management practices.

A major component of the project will be the use of spatially-designed on-farm field trial sites to test the water use efficiency, productivity and risks associated with:
• a range of continuous cereal systems and the decisions, inputs, timing and agronomy that surrounds these systems;
• potential break crops across a range of soil types.

These sites have been located and designed to encompass the highly variable soil types and production related potentials that exists in paddocks across the Mallee and are at Karoonda in SA and Ouyen in North West Victoria. Local farmer steering groups have been established to have input on trial and treatment design that will address local issues with some on farm trials and demonstrations planned also.

To add value to the field trials, EM38 along with simulation modeling (APSIM and Yield Prophet) will be used to test strategies and recommendations to gain an understanding of long term implications and a broader range of scenarios based on information such as available water present in the soil profile at sowing, soil type, previous crops grown, chemical history and growing season rainfall that has been collected across the trial sites.

To view the WUE Focus Site Yield Prophet Crop Reports click here..

For more information and details of this project contact the MSF agronomist Michael Moodie on 0448 612 892.