Investment

Farm profitability can be improved by identifying the factors that drive profit and adopting management that optimises returns and mitigates risks. Growers are under mounting pressure to maintain profitability due to constraints such as input costs, herbicide resistance, declining soil fertility, increasing soil-borne pathogens and climatic variability.

By employing a farming systems approach, the implications of strategic options (e.g. enterprise choice and sequence, livestock integration, risk positioning, and GHG mitigation) and tactical decisions (e.g. time of sowing, fertiliser application, crop protection) can be evaluated over time. However, growers don't have the means nor capacity to test the full breadth of enterprise choices available for their system to consider all options outside their business-as-usual practices.

Growers' management decisions may have short-term beneficial outcomes with long-term consequences that can significantly impact future profitability, either positively or negatively. While crop type and sequence will impact profitability in any given year, significant legacy effects of crop sequence and fertiliser strategy drive farming system profitability years into the future. Australian farmers have been enthusiastic adopters of crop benchmarking tools (e.g. French and Schultz or less so, Yield Prophet) to compare the performance of individual crops to water-limited potential. However, in dryland farming systems, the efficiency of resource use must also be accounted for across years, for the inevitable legacy effects of one crop or pasture or fallow in rotation on the next (i.e. carry over effects on water, N, weeds and disease).

Farming systems investments in the GRDC northern region (DAQ2007-004RMX; CSP2110-004RMX) have demonstrated that coupling field research with modelling and economic analysis can illustrate where opportunities and risks to system profitability lie. Comparison of contrasting systems, made up of different combinations of treatments, across different sub-regions using common metrics is a powerful tool to assist growers to make informed decisions. Systems can be compared for one and/or multiple factors including water use efficiency (kg/mm), diseases, weeds and nutrition measured and manipulated with cropping frequency.

This investment will collect the requisite comprehensive data to calculate contemporary and emerging farming systems efficiency for the southern region.