CFF00011 - Improving farming system efficiency in southern NSW

Australian grain growers have adopted crop benchmarking tools such as the French and Schultz water use efficiency (WUE) tool to compare the performance of individual crops with predicted water-limited potential. However less work has focussed on the efficiency of an entire crop sequence, where the legacies of water, nitrogen, weeds and diseases act over time to influence the productivity, efficiency and sustainability of different crop sequences. Recent studies suggest that the efficiency gap at the sequence level is even greater than that at the crop level, providing significant opportunities to develop systems and practices that increase system efficiency and profitability. Although focussed on southern NSW growers, this project will work closely with existing farming systems projects in the northern region to (i) review the current cropping system efficiency in southern NSW to identify the key drivers of efficiency and profitability (ii) conduct field experiments and linked simulation modelling studies to assess the impacts of different sequence and management strategies and (iii) develop recommendations specific to the region that account for economic, climate and price risks, and the long-term sustainability of the cropping system.