Sustainable Soil Field Days

The Making Good Better project held two field days last week to showcase the work that has been done during the project. The days were also used to launch the Soil Quality website for Tasmania. This website can be used by farmers for benchmarking their soil data. It also has a series of factsheets covering soil issues including soil structure, water logging, cation exchange capacity, and calculators which can be used to calculate the cost of growing green manure or retaining stubble or applying different types of lime. Andrew Wherrett and Dan Murphy from the Soil Quality program in WA came over for the days and gave us some insights both into the website and soil issues in WA.

David Rowlings from Queensland University of Technology gave us a very detailed overview of the soil carbon and nitrogen cycles and how closely linked the two are. He had some excellent tips for improving the efficiency of N fertiliser use - leaks have environmental impacts as well as costing dollars. Bill Cotching reviewed the soil survey and trial results from the MGB projects and we also heard from some of the farmers involved in the MGB project. The weather was reasonably kind at Bothwell and we were able to visit Llanberis (Richard Hallett) and Dennistoun (Tom Edgell) where we looked at the soils being farmed in the area and some of the field testing techniques for assessing soil quality. Richard also gave an overview of the Variable Rate Irrigation technology that is being used on some of his centre pivot irrigators. Unfortunately at Dairy Plains the rain got the better of us, but we did have a quick trip out to Juniper Lea (Rob Terry) where we were able to play with some dirt and hear about some of Rob's farming operation.
For a look at the presentations from the field days click on the link to the Macquarie Franklin website. The Mac Frank website also has a copy of the MGB Demo Trial Booklet available for download, plus other information from the project, including farmer case studies.

For more information about the soil quality program go to the Soil Quality website