INNOVATIVE technology is taking the guesswork out of crop selection and soil moisture management.
Moree district cropping manager Byron Birch, Rimanui Farms, has embraced the use of electromagnetic technology to take soil moisture readings, which allowed him to more accurately plan his cropping and better predict his yields, reducing the cost of multi-peril crop insurance.
Mr Birch uses the Precision Agriculture EM38, the mobile device is used to record conductivity variances across paddocks. However, Mr Birch now used the device for the new purpose of taking soil moisture readings.
He said using the technology made it a lot easier to decide what to sow at the start of planting, and it was especially useful in the past few years when there had been marginal soil moisture.
The information gathered by the EM38 allowed Mr Birch to see if the available water before planting, combined with the average rainfall, was would be enough to support a crop with a profitable gross margin.
"This year we've dropped about 4000 hectares out of our cropping program for the season due to the data," Mr Birch said.
"If we know there is enough moisture in the soil and the prediction for the rest of the season is quite good, we'll go and apply nitrogen on the crop during the season to boost yields and protein.
"And the measurement we do at the end of the season is to benchmark our water use efficiency and nitrogen use efficiency."
Mr Birch said the next step was to start using the figures for multi-peril crop insurance.
"The more accurate you can get your yield prediction, the less the cost of the insurance," he said.
"Previously we'd only measure before planting, during the season and at the end of planting, but I think that will be monthly now to get a better estimate on the insurance policy so that will save us money in the long run."
He said the EM38 was easy to use, the only tricky bit being the equation that it used to calculate the data - which Mr Birch was "still mucking around with a little bit".
"But in crude form it's fairly accurate, the actual device itself is highly accurate, as accurate as anything else on the market, it's just how accurate I want to be."
He said the proper calibration could be done with a soil sample dried out using the oven bake soil test.
"That gives you a very accurate way of looking into a soil," he said.
"The way we've been doing it is measuring at the end of harvest, as it has been dry finishes in the past few years, and we've taken a full point reading at the start of planting this year... and that's given us our range of crop-available water in our soils."
Mr Birch previously used the device to map the soils on the property.
"We've used results from the device for a long time," he said.
"A lot of farmers know about the soil classification and mapping abilities of the device, but nobody has been using it for moisture, and that's what we've done in the past year."
Research conducted by the CSIRO, which has trialled the EM38, persuaded Mr Birch to give it a go.
He said the results from the EM38 closely matched what satellites showed about the property's soil.
Before using the EM38 Mr Birch had used a push probe and neutron moisture meter, which only took a small soil measurement, and the steel or plastic tube inserted into the soil also caused the soil around it to crack.
"In the clay, the soil around the tube dries out more than the crops or plants have been doing, so obviously the results don't have a good correlation to the crop," he said.
"It doesn't read what the rest of the crop is doing.
"The difference between the probes and the EM38 is the amount of bulk soil it measures.
"The neutron moisture meter is probably about five centimetres maximum that it reads outside of the core, whereas the EM38 measures the full width of the coils, which is about a metre or half a metre, measuring a lot more soil."
He said the bigger reading was particularly important in marginal years where the cracks around the probes could hold moisture, but right beside the crack might be only half a profile.
Paddock traffic also caused issues.
"You leave it in for a year or two and you inevitably get a header or planter hit it and you can try and fix it but sometimes you just had to draw another hole and put another one in and that was the main reason I was getting sick of it," he said.
"I had 12 tubes in last year and only three were readable by the end of the season."
