GCTV17 - Northern Farming Systems
Narrator: Hollie Baillieu Two in every three graingrowers in Australia's
northern region could benefit from modifying their farming systems.
It's a conclusion drawn from computer modeling that simulated total farm yields based on
paddock histories compared with actual yields.
Lindsay Bell: CSIRO Farming Systems So that means there's some issues around how
people put their farming systems together, either trade offs between particular crops
they're grown or other challenges in their system which means that they're not achieving
the potential of their current farming system.
Narrator: The modeling formed the foundations for a
northern farming systems project funded by GRDC.
While feedback from grower focus groups shaped the trials so they'd provide meaningful results.
David Lawrence: Queensland Department of Agriculture & Fisheries
the farmer focus groups in the project are critical actually because the aim was to find
out how they make decisions in their farming system, what are the major challenges and
what are the problems that they see evolving into the future.
Narrator: Three key challenges were identified by the
focus groups.
The first was how they utilised rainfall, allowing crops to make the most of available
soil moisture.
Lindsay Bell: the second was how they put their sequence
of crops together in their farming systems to make sure that they manage the presence
of weeds, diseases and pests in their cropping system.
Narrator: The third challenge for growers to make sure
crops have sufficient nutrient in any particular season to maximise yield.
Research partners CSIRO, Queensland's department of Agriculture & Fisheries and NSW's DPI established
trial sites from Central Queensland to NSW's western plains.
David Lawrence: We have seven sites in the program.
We have a major site near Toowoomba that looks at I think 38 systems and all the interactions
between them.
Narrator: 38 farming systems might sound like overkill
but it reflects the complexity of the northern region.
Some growers focus on summer crops, others on winter crops while others again have a
mix on their farms.
Lindsay Bell: So what we are trying to do on the farming
systems project is to see how important some levers that growers can pull might be.
So the first lever is how frequently they sow crops so if they change that from one
year to another will that change how their farming system performs.
Narrator: The second lever is crop sequencing and how
that impacts a systems performance in terms of weed, disease and pest management.
While the third lever is nutrition.
Lindsay Bell: whether they put in place practices which
maintain their soil resources for the long term and how that has implications on the
system as a whole.
Narrator: Various amounts of applied nutrients, use
of break crops such as canola, the frequency of legumes in crop rotations, crop densities
and many more scenarios across the 38 farming systems should answer a lot of questions.
Paul McIntosh: Landmark agronomist Southern Queensland
As an agronomist, you get about 77 questions a day and each ones different so the questions
you need to answer are all of those ones.
They're all about water use efficiency, they're all about nutrition, they're all about herbicide,
they're all about resistance, they're all about which crops are most profitable so you
get those questions every day so anything I learn here will be helpful for the future,
I can guarantee that.
Narrator: Initial funding for the program is for 5 years
and it will take time to evaluate the various cropping options.
What will also be studied is how the systems affect soils.
Lindsay Bell: So over the life of the project we'll be conducting
repeated sampling of particularly soils to see how those different crop rotations affect
soil carbon, soil pathogen loads and soil nutrient availability
Narrator: And always the objective will be to get those
two in every three northern grain growers not already maximising whole farm productivity
and profitability closer to that goal.