FarmLink Annual Soils Open Day

On Friday 14 September 2018, I attended the GRDC Soils Open Day hosted by FarmLink in Temora, NSW. Colleague Mark Glover and I presented our research work in the Digiscape soil inverse modelling project. The audience included FarmLink staff, GRDC representatives, farmers and consultants.

Our soil inverse modelling project aims to predict plant available water holding capacity (PAWC) of soils using vegetation dynamics and crop yield, providing an alternative and more efficient approach to the current slow and expensive direct measurements of soil properties – the ‘digging holes’ method.

Instead, what we’re doing is working on estimating soil properties using what’s happening above the ground.

My preliminary modelling results indicated a good relationship between soil PAWC and crop yield, which implies that soil PAWC can potentially be predicted from good records of paddock history information including crop yield.

At the Open Day, we specifically addressed the importance of on-farm data for our research work and the mutual benefits for both us and the farmers with better soil information/predictions. This attracted a lot of interest and inquiries from FarmLink and individual farmers.

More about our project is here.

If you are interested in our project and have data to share with us, please feel free to contact me on Di.He@csiro.au.

By Dr Di He, Digiscape Postdoctoral Fellow