6 minute read
Discovery mission
BY RENNE CLUFF
A group of South Johnstone Basin sugarcane growers is brimming with new ideas for practice change, after taking part in a study tour to southern Queensland.
Seven growers representing five separate enterprises were invited by University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) Farming Systems Professor Bernard Schroeder to the Toowoomba region, to hear from academics and researchers in the agricultural field, farming equipment suppliers, as well as counterparts in other broadacre and horticultural crop industries.
Professor Schroeder works intensively with the cane growers as part of the Cassowary Coast Reef Smart Farming (CCRSF) project. The water quality program is designed to reduce dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) runoff through farm practice changes that improve sugarcane productivity and crop nutrient-use efficiency (NUE).
“For us (the growers), it’s about productivity, profitability and how we can advance forward,” said Innisfail cane grower Joseph Marano. “The relationship we have with Bernard Schroeder and the University can make our goals more achievable.”
Professor Schroeder said the study tour was aimed at sparking step change. “We wanted to inspire innovative practice change for improved crop performance,” he explained.
“It was a unique opportunity to take practice change beyond current industry best practice by stimulating thinking ‘outside the box’ and enhancing sustainability.”
The group of growers who attended the tour are based in the wettest region of Australia, tucked between the Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics world heritage areas.
Their land encompasses some of the country’s most unique and challenging soils, featuring low cation exchange capacities (CECs), inherent acidity, high leaching potential and in some cases, extremely high phosphorus buffer indexes (PBIs).
“Growers in this area have been at the forefront of Reef water quality initiatives for more than 15 years now,” CCRSF Project Leader Debra Telford said.
“They are progressive, and they continue to seek knowledge and find new ways to fine-tune and improve their farming systems.”
UniSQ Associate Professor Troy Jensen explained that the itinerary aimed at giving the participants a rounded experience, focusing on scientific, engineering and interindustry collaboration. Presentations from a variety of researchers at UniSQ’s Centre for Agricultural Engineering (CAE) included Farming Systems Innovation, Irrigation and Water Management, Mechatronic Engineering, Energy and Bioresource Recycling, and Robotics, Automation and Machine Learning.
The growers also visited two farming operations, a macadamia and pecan nut processing factory, as well as dealers and manufacturers of agricultural machinery and implements.
At Moira Farming in the Lockyer Valley, Farm Manager Mitch Brimblecombe took the sugarcane growers on a tour of his cotton and carrot fields and explained rotations with other crops including beans and onions.
“I was really interested to see that with their carrot crops, it was all about plants per square metre, which is what we should be about when it comes to yield,” said cane and papaya grower Joe Zappala. “They don’t tolerate gaps. We just accept the gaps in our cane rows and that’s not right.”
Finding solutions to sugarcane row gaps was further discussed by UniSQ’s Centre for Agricultural Engineering team, who’ve been using drone camera mapping technology to investigate the possible causes and solutions, including thresholds for planting gaps.
The same technology is also being used to detect and map weeds in sugarcane, which the growers said could provide a more cost-effective solution than current commercialised automated spot spraying technology. It was confirmed that algorithms are being trialled to differentiate guinea grass from sugarcane. “If you’ve got a guinea grass problem, it’s really time consuming,” explained Joseph Marano. “This is something we could use. We can get the GPS on my sprayer using the drone map to understand where and when to spot spray. I don’t want to still be talking about this in five years’ time, I want to do it now. We’re all trying to do more with less and something like this is likely to assist growers who are time poor to be more productive.”
Joseph said the year-on-year data could also help detect any possible herbicide resistance and perhaps enable known problem areas to be targeted with pre-emergent chemicals.
Growers also learned about other monitoring and sensing technologies that can be used to detect various crop conditions from leaf disease to harvester losses and cane growth rates according to soil moisture and sunshine.
“If we can measure it, we can manage it,” said cane and papaya farmer Josh Oldano. “If I didn’t witness those presentations, I wouldn’t have known those projects have occurred, let alone that the technology is available.”
Another major highlight was a drive to a dryland farming property at Norwin in the Darling Downs, where cotton and grains producer John ‘Cowboy’ Cameron addressed the group.
“There are a lot of similarities between cotton and sugarcane,” reflected cane grower Alan Aquilina.
It’s brilliant that we can have a group of growers in a room seeing this research so we can go back and say, ‘Hey listen up, this stuff’s fantastic.’”
Peter Becke, CCRSF Extension Officer
“We are each producing quality crops by world standards, which are then processed by a mill or a gin and sold on a global market. It was interesting to learn how Cowboy prepares his soil and how the cotton industry has overcome some major challenges, particularly with regards to pest pressures.”
Visits to John Deere dealer RDO Equipment, STAG Machinery Group, which sells New Holland and Case IH machinery, and farm equipment manufacturers Gessner further complemented the experience.
“We got to physically see some of the precision farming technology at the dealerships, and we were able to ask a lot of questions,” said cane grower Adrian Darveniza. “We need the greenon-green technology to detect weeds and the manufacturers are working in conjunction with researchers to come up with solutions.
“Some of the implements we saw were also pretty impressive. It was interesting to see how things are made and talk to the people who actually design the equipment.”
The partnership between UniSQ and CCRSF will further be strengthened when researchers visit South Johnstone Basin farmers later this year.
“I look forward to the exchange when we go up to your part of the country,” said CAE Director, Prof Bernadette McCabe. “The Cassowary Coast environment is something very unique and special and the farming practices adopted there have to reflect that.
“It’s a sensitive area, where through great practices and advancements sugarcane growers have maintained their sustainability and ongoing future of farming.”
CCRSF is funded by the partnership between the Australian Government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.
