Managing micronutrient deficiencies in cropping systems of eastern Australia

Managing micronutrient deficiciencies in cropping systems of eastern Australia

Project Proposal and Description

Many of the soils in Australia under agricultural production are very old and infertile. This infertility, if left untreated, can result in widespread and severe nutrient deficiencies, including those caused by poor supply or use of micronutrients. While management packages to treat N and P deficiencies are common and well-entrenched across the continent, strategies for managing micronutrient deficiencies are less well known. There is also increasing concern that micronutrient supplies from the soil may no longer be adequate for current cropping systems which are more productive, more intensive and more reliant on supplies of fertiliser N and P. These concerns are often coming from districts where micronutrient deficiencies have not been thought to be a problem in the past.

While micronutrient management packages for Mn, Zn and Cu deficiency in southern Australian systems exist, these were developed in farming systems which are now 20-40 years old and when fertilisers were relatively cheap. There is increasing speculation that those packages may not be adequate for contemporary cropping systems, that they may not be cost effective under current economic regimes where fertilisers are substantially dearer or that they may not be appropriate for the new areas of cropping which are quite different to the areas in which they originally developed (typically the reliable cropping regions of SA and WA).

This project will address these increasing concerns and speculation in a three pronged approach for all six micronutrients named in the tender (Mn, Zn, Cu, B, Mo, Fe) for all cropping regions in Australia except for those in WA. This project will liaise closely with a separate bid being prepared by Dr Ross Brennan of DAFWA to address issues in WA specifically, should that bid be successful. This project will produce clear guidelines for management of micronutrient disorders for the major crops in the southern and northern regions of GRDC based on existing knowledge which has been objectively tested for its relevance to modern cropping systems and modernised for current technologies and economic circumstances where necessary.

The first activity of this project will be to set up a steering committee of experts in crop nutrition who specialise in micronutrient management in cropping systems. The proposed members of this committee have already been contacted and all have agreed to join this group. They represent the majority of remaining expertise on micronutrient management in cropping systems of Australia. The responsibilities of this committee are to:
provide guidance and direction for the project,
interpret data generated by the R&D component of the project,
oversee development of extension materials and programmes for the project,
commission R,D & E work to the most appropriate FS groups and agency teams across the cropping areas of the GRDC southern and northern regions and,
supervise and mentor a part time project officer

The project officer will coordinate project activities, assist with R,D & E wherever possible, collate and analyse data from commissioned work and assist with project management and reporting. This position is a key component of the project because this position will be part of a succession plan to transfer the collective knowledge of the experts in the steering committee to emerging R,D&E people.

The project team will develop standard protocols for the design, layout and conduct of field experiments investigating micronutrient disorders in cropping systems in time for work to be commissioned in the 2014 growing season (Output 1).

Areas and situations where disorders of either Mn, Zn, Cu, B, Mo or Fe are likely to occur will then be identified using the recent report by Rob Norton which identifies vulnerable soil types and consultation with FS groups, advisers and consultants from across both GRDC regions for recent occurrences of problems.

Field experiments, designed with standard monitoring protocols developed by the steering committee, will be commissioned for the 2014-17 seasons to appropriate R teams to investigate or showcase application or management strategies to major crops in targeted situations (output 2). Some of these experiments in the first two seasons will be designed to monitor residual benefits of micronutrient applications in subsequent years (output 3).

The field work commissioned by the project will be used to fill gaps in knowledge of micronutrient management and to confirm those aspects of conventional wisdom which are still relevant to modern cropping systems. These combined sources of information will be used to review and revamp existing fact sheets on micronutrient management into GRDC layout. These will be disseminated to the industry via GRDC and FS group networks (output 4). The first of these factsheets will be produced after the first season of project field results have been gained and interpreted (early 2015) and then one for each disorder by the end of the project (a minimum of eight).

The project will use monitoring and evaluation processes of the FS groups commissioned to assist in E activities to assess project impact (output 5) and will keep GRDC informed of progress and issues through timely delivery of progress and final reports as well as informal contact on a frequent basis to the appropriate panel and programme members. Formal scientific papers will be published base on the field data.

The database component of output 1 is problematic and will not be fully addressed as described in the investment plan although all project data will be archived in a suitable spreadsheet or database format for easy collation and retrieval. There are insufficient resources in the tender to produce a database of project and historical micronutrient field experiments searchable by the public in the same ilk as the Better Fertiliser Decisions for Cropping database for soil testing of N, P, K or S. However, the alternative of not producing a new database but modifying the BFD one to incorporate micronutrient experiments also has several difficulties. There are still insufficient resources to recruit historical experiments, the BFDC database is not structured for plant and soil testing data (relatively minor issue), the analytical modules would have to be redrafted extensively (major task) and the interface would have to be substantially re-structured to accommodate searches for micronutrient information (major task). This bid proposes to negotiate this component with GRDC as part of the post EOI or project development processes.