Riverine Plains hyper yielding crop trial results proving interesting

In conjunction with GRDC and FAR Australia the Riverine Plains hyper yielding crop project has been running since 2020 and is focused at pushing the yield boundaries in wheat, barley and canola, with three farm focus sites at Gerogery, Culcairn and Howlong as well as local grower sites.

While results were not able to have been drawn from the 2022 trials due to the crops being heavily impacted by the wet weather, Riverine Plains project officer Kate Coffey said there had been interesting results from previous years of trials.

Speaking at the Riverine Plains season update Ms Coffey said in 2020 the trial looked at using fungicide on Trojan wheat at the Culcairn site.

"Mainly what we found was using a good spray at grow stage 32 and grow stage 39 there was a significant increase in yield by about 2t/ha in Trojan compared to just using it at tilling," she said.

Ms Coffey said another trial looked at nitrogen rates in canola and wheat with three paddock trials over three years.

"What we found was the most profitable rates of nitrogen were the medium rates of nitrogen. When we went to the higher rates sometimes we got a higher yield but it wasn't always more profitable," she said.

Another aspect of the nitrogen trials was while the higher rates might not have necessarily converted to yield one year, to go back the next.

"It showed that even if you did get a little bit extra nitrogen into your canola and it didn't utilise it, it was utilised in the following wheat crop in terms of nitrogen and yield," she said.

Another trial looked at spreading lime versus incorporating it to look at whether addressing acidity in the paddock could help the crop.

Ms Coffey said they knew the canola paddock had acidity at depth and by incorporating the lime they were able to address that acidity, whereas by spreading the lime hadn't moved in the 12 months.

"What we found then in that subsequent canola paddock was that we got a lot more biomass growth of the canola where we incorporated that lime compared to where we spread it," she said.

"Unfortunately we couldn't get yield maps off that paddock, but we did see a response in the NDVI imagery that showed incorporation gave us more production."

The current project runs until early 2024.