Better Fertilizer Decisions for Crops

The grains and fertiliser industries are seeking a better understanding of nutrient response to enable better fertiliser recommendations to be made. BFDC will provide the first accessible online repository of searchable trials. The project will publish key regional and national responsiveness curves, but will also provide users with the opportunity to interrogate the database and compare crops, soils, seasons or farming systems.
Importantly the project enables us to establish and consolidate national and regional standards for soil test critical levels for N, P, K and S.
This will enable organizations to update and/or verify decision support systems and result in improved understanding of soil tests and consistent interpretation of results. In turn that will result in better directed research as future trials are targeted at knowledge gaps.
Ultimately this means better DSS for organisations, more reliance on soil testing by growers, better fertiliser use efficiency and greater accountability for fertiliser recommendations.
So far, 1300 crop nutrient response trials for N, P, K and S in cereals, oilseeds and pulses have been added to the national BFDC database. The majority of these trials are for wheat, but there are also large amounts of data across Australia for barley, canola and lupins. Approximately 4,000 trials will be held in the database by the end of March 2011.
These data will represent all available trials conducted in Australia since the 1960’s.
The BFDC Interrogator has been developed as a web-based tool that can select data sets from the database and fit response curves to those set. It is currently being finalised to enable users to query the database using nutrient specific criteria. The Interrogator will be road tested by the project team and released for use by approved users in 2012.
For more information see: http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/info/BFDC