Optimising sorghum yield through agronomic management

The overall aim of this project is to develop the knowledge and tools to assist growers and advisers on early sowing decisions for sorghum. The project will investigate how do combinations of sorghum hybrids, crop management and the environment modify stress environments and yield distributions in early sown sorghum, and what is the influence on the cropping system?

In the GRDC's Northern Region, managing heat and moisture stress at critical growth stages remains important to increasing yields and reducing the likelihood of uneconomical sorghum crops. The main adaptation strategy for growers to manage these stresses is to avoid the overlap between heat stress events and flowering. This can be achieved by targeting optimum flowering windows and selecting more than one hybrid to spread the risk of all their crops flowering in the same window. Sites will be characterised to allow APSIM modelling combined with economic analyses, so that cropping system impacts of non-standard sorghum sowing times can be quantified. In addition, agronomic management guidelines for the key sorghum production zones across the GRDC's Northern Region will be updated based on the results of this project's trial data and modelling outputs.