Building Soil Function

Boosting Sandy Soil Productivity & Resilience with Testing & Break Crops

Increasing the productivity and resilience of sandy soils through targeted soil testing, amelioration, and adoption of higher-value break crops, including lentils and beans.

  • Advancing Sandy Soils with Innovation

    Boost sandy soil productivity and resilience with advanced soil testing, tailored amelioration techniques, and high-value break crops like lentils and beans.

  • Building Resilient Soils

    This project improves farming resilience by addressing soil constraints, enhancing crop diversity and value, and reducing erosion risks through soil amelioration and biomass production.

  • Project Justification

    Improving sandy soils enables profitable break crops like lentils, addressing agronomic challenges and soil erosion risks for better productivity.

Project Overview

Building Resilience Through Soil Testing and Amelioration Practices

Understanding soil constraints via soil testing and applying the appropriate amelioration practices can improve the resilience of farming systems. This soils-based focus is based on the following principles;

  1. Identifying and adopting various best management practices in a group learning environment.
  2. Increasing the value (and profitability) of crops that can be grown on the same total area of cropping land.
  3. Increasing the diversity of crop selection depending on seasonal conditions (and adapting to such conditions as part of a risk management framework).
  4. Improving water holding capacity and production potential of the poorer performing soils through adopting such practices as soil amelioration.
  5. Increasing biomass production on erosion-prone sandy soils to reduce the potential for soil erosion risk as well as potentially increasing soil organic carbon levels
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Justification for the project

The key focus is on farmers’ growing higher-value break crops (such as lentils) and improving the productivity of sandy soils. Such break crops offer the opportunity to return higher profits than wheat or vetch, but due to poor soil conditions, they face agronomic and soil erosion-related risks.

Farmer experience has demonstrated that the current production of lentils yielding (at 0.3-0.4t/ha) provides higher financial returns than average wheat yields. Field peas are too risky to grow on the lighter sandy soils, whilst vetch provides a good break but has low economic returns. Some farmers are avoiding lentil production on the lighter sandy soils and just growing them on the heavier soil types; this creates issues with managing multiple crop types within one paddock. Therefore, this project aims to address such challenges by identifying how best lentils can be grown on lighter sandy soils consistently with minimal agronomic and soil erosion risks. Anticipated outcomes include improving paddock profitability, managing problem soils, and increasing system efficiency.

Addressing Challenges and Unlocking Opportunities in Sandy Soil Management

The project has been developed through the need as identified by farmers to address the following challenges and opportunities;

  1. The opportunity to produce higher value break crops than current medic pastures.
  2. There is a need to improve cover and production on sandhills.
  3. The opportunity to provide disease and nutrition benefits to the following crops.
  4. To improve overall paddock profitability and make the system work as a whole.
  5. To identify how best soil amelioration practices can be used on the lighter sandy soils to enhance the productivity of subsequent legume and cereal crops

Discoveries

Key outcomes

  • 1
    Step

    Strengthening Agronomist Engagement on the Eyre Peninsula

    From an AIR EP perspective, our key goal, more recently, has been to better engage with the retail agronomists on EP. This project has enabled us to work directly with eight Elders agronomists on the Eyre Peninsula and has worked extremely well.
  • 2
    Step

    Challenges of Lentil Production on Saline and Magnesia-Affected Soils

    Lentil production is not suited to soils having higher salinity levels or those having “magnesia patches”
  • 3
    Step

    Benefits and Risks of Soil Amelioration for Pulse Crops

    Soil amelioration (deep ripping) is advantageous to the following pulse crops compared to cereals, but there are potential issues with a lack of soil cover.
  • 4
    Step

    On-Row Sowing: Improved Establishment with Moisture and Salt Management

    On-row sowing is seeing better establishment (increased moisture, diluted salt). Potential issues include increasing disease pressure (sowing on stubbles, but there is uncertainty about how long this benefit will last.

Barriers to adoption

The barriers to the adoption of improved soil management practices, such as soil amelioration and improved use of fertilisers through soil testing, include the following;

  1. Lack of awareness and knowledge
    Farmers are not sure where to start – some are adopting practices because it has worked on the neighbour’s place without being clear on constraints they need to address. Research expertise was accessed to help identify and explain the impacts of soil constraints in small farmer group settings. These were conducted within local environments that allowed shared discussions and learning between farmers and technical experts.
  1. Lack of time and cost
    Farmers believe soil testing is expensive (an extra cost and time requirement). Farmers will develop an improved understanding and awareness of soil testing processes by working with local retail agronomists. This needs to be viewed in the context of the opportunity for potential gains to be made or losses avoided through accessing information to assist with decision-making (relating to fertiliser and soil nutrient management).

Group contact: Naomi Scholz

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