It would be hard to find a more impressive trial than this Hyper
Yielding Cereals project in northern Tasmania. It's a great pleasure and honour
to open the field day thank you. The project is a five-year investment for
GRDC and its partners Far Australia and Southern Farming Systems. For growers the
benefits will have a much longer lifespan.
If the grain growers can come here and they see that they're they're producing
five, seven tonnes per hectare on their farms and they can see here people
producing 14 and 15 tonnes per hectare with really strong profitability
driving that so not a huge extra cost to their businesses, go away really excited
and ask questions. What's the equation and make it happen. A hundred and sixty
very curious locals as well as mainlanders turned out to get some
answers and see for themselves the extent of the work. This research site we
have a thousand experimental plots that are dedicated to improving feed grain
productivity here in Tasmania with that special emphasis not only on picking the
right agronomic characteristics such as as it got the right development profile
for Tasmania but disease resistance and standing power but equally what's its
quality attributes for an end-user. The first year of the project 2015 was a
planning year over the next two years the germ plasm was sourced. Local and
imported long season cereal lines, 50 of wheat and 10 of barley were sown in early
April and around Anzac Day to compare their potential those lacking the right
characteristics especially disease resistance were culled
and by the 2018 season only ten lines remained. Tasmania because of its
naturally wetter environment, irrigated environment means that disease
pressure is probably the highest of any point in Australia and lasts for
longer than anywhere in Australia so if we don't have good disease resistance we
are actually going to be chasing our tail
with regards to fungicide inputs. A major fungal disease of the high
rainfall zone cereals is septoria triticeae blotch. That disease is now
spreading to medium rainfall zones and that's focused even more attention on
the hyper yielding cereals project from plant breeders and R&D centers such as
Curtin University's Centre for Crop and Disease Management. The reason why we're
here in Tasmania today is because Tasmania unfortunately seems to be ground
zero for fungus or resistance. As well as identifying the best germ plasm, the best
disease resistance, standability and grain quality understanding the
nutrient input necessary to achieve hyper yields is another focus of the
project. We estimated in our first year in 2016 that we were in some of our
highest yielding varieties taking out 400 to 450 kilos of nitrogen out of the soil.
So nutrition has been a focus for us but
it's quite ironic. We haven't found that applying 400 kilos of nitrogen to the
crop has been necessary to generate those yields. So we know that the
fertility of our farming system is actually what's supporting those yields
in the first place. Now we have to look at replacing that nutrition
but it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to put huge amounts of applied
fertiliser in fact our optimums here have rarely been above 200 to 225 kilos of N.
The abundant nitrogen levels of these fertile northern Tasmanian farming
systems is due in large part to the vast selection of rotation crops and mixed
farming enterprise options here and that sets the region apart from the mainland
regions. The common ground is that these hyper yielding cereals are being grown
in a high rainfall zone. We've now set up the South Australian Crop Technology
Centre and that was inspired by growers and advisors from southeast South
Australia coming down to Hyper Yielding and saying why don't we do something
like this in our neck of the woods and in 2017 the highest yielding variety on
this site was the same as the highest yielding variety at Millicent in
southeast South Australia.
Lifting yields even to the projects inspirational target of the top 10% of
growers achieving 14 tonnes per hectare comes with a caveat. Grain quality also
needs to improve to meet the feed grain sector's specifications. And whether it's
the protein or whether it's the starch that that particular sector wants and
whether some of these candidates are able to produce that more efficiently
than others so this engagement with the end-user
is again a really important objective of the project. And as the project
identifies something that has the promise to offer more productivity more
profitability, it's farmed out to what Nick Poole calls the project's focus farms.
And the ideal is to try out either germ plasm or perhaps a technique that
we think's looking particularly favourable so absolutely it's loaded no no good us
doing the research unless we can get the adoption on-farm as quickly as possible.
Three focus farms have been established in Tasmania and there are farmers as far
away as WA's Esperance region wanting to get involved and with two years to go
until the Hyper Yielding Cereals project winds up, it's already very successfully
caught the imagination of high rainfall zone grain growers everywhere.