Investment

The Service Provider is engaged to deliver development and extension to close the economic yield gap and maximise farming systems benefits from grain legume production in Central and Southern New South Wales. This will be achieved through the delivery of a hub and spoke model for grower driven grain legume validation and demonstration trials across Central and Southern NSW to address these gaps. This model includes 2 major validation (hub) sites and 5 on farm demonstration (spoke) sites.

• Hub sites will focus on a combination of sub-regional grower-driven D&E priorities and extension of new research learnings from aligned projects delivering a series of fully replicated trial designs to measure yield gap.
• Spoke sites will focus on-farm with one to two simple trials at each site which may include paddock scale strip trials, and/or small demonstration plot trials driven by local grower D&E priorities.

Trials undertaken will cater to the following:

1. Economic impacts of grain legumes on farm profitability (approx. 50%);
2. Disease and integrated weed management in grain legumes (approx. 20%); and
3. Flexible responses to emerging grower issues, primarily arising from the GRDC Grower Networks (approx. 30%).

Other key components of this procurement include the delivery of flexible extension activities linked to each of the sites, including provisions for peer-to-peer approaches, and are designed to enable a bespoke approach for targeting grower behaviour change around specific practices.

Monitoring and evaluation to benchmark grower behaviour change and adoption, is a key component of this investment. This will include measures such as area grown to grain legumes, crop mix and rotation, economic yield gaps.