APSRU Seminar Series 19/05/05

Presenter:
Dr Daniel Rodriguez, Principal Scientist, APSRU, DPI&F, Toowoomba

Topic:
"Advances in the management of temporal and spatial variability in the landscape."

Abstract:
Having last year’s yield maps is one thing but what we really want to know is what this year’s yield map will look like.

With the aim of marrying nitrogen fertilizer management to crop needs without ignoring rainfall, the "GRDC Precision Agriculture Initiative" project together with the Victorian DPI funded project "Future Farming Systems" aims to take remote sensing and precision agriculture a step further. Analysing several years of yield maps from a Birchip Cropping Group paddock, the team from the DPI -Precision Agriculture team identified not just high, medium and low yield areas but ‘flip-flop’ areas where yields are high or low in different seasons.

The project combines yield maps and soil analyses including electric conductivity mapping to identify limiting factors such as salinity within each of the management zones as a means of predicting the variability. The interpretation is married to real time crop monitoring and seasonal forecasting to more precisely manage nitrogen fertilizer treatment.

Seasonal forecasting is the last link in the chain needed to get the right amount of fertilizer in the right place at the right time. Correlations between the Southern Oscillation index in June and July and rainfall for the rest of the season are being examined. The GRDC project “Tools to reduce the impact of climate variability in south eastern Australia” is producing exciting results that are being incorporated across a number of projects.

The PowerPoint Presentation of this seminar is available here as a pdf file (1.41MB).