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The Healthy Soils Symposium - Can Australian Soils Sustain our Agricultural Systems?

Proceedings

Investors in the Healthy Soils for Sustainable Farms programme are proud to convene a Symposium on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The event poses a challenging question and invites farmers, scientists, agronomists and economists to find answers. Can Australian soils sustain our agricultural systems? At this event we are confident that delegates will go home with valuable new perspectives and a better capacity to formulate their own answers. We are particularly proud of (more)...

Irrigation Update 10

Modernisation of Irrigation Water Delivery Systems

This issue discusses the opportunities and challenges of upgrading irrigation water delivery infrastructure across Australia.

Defining precision irrigation: a new approach to irrigation management

Despite the widespread promotion and adoption of precision agriculture in dry-land cropping systems, the concept of irrigation being part of precision agricultural systems is still getting off the ground, both in Australia and internationally. There is currently no cohesive framework available to guide research, development or adoption of precision irrigation and its associated support technologies. This project is reviewing irrigation research, existing technologies and the use of precision (more)...

New paradigms to find solutions to intractable natural resource management problems

This final report presents the results of the project conducted from 1 July 2005 to 3 July 2008. The project consisted of three phases: firstly, the investigation of personality types of people involved with natural resource management and policy acros

NPSI Strategic Plan Phase 2

2007 - 2010

The new Phase of NPSI will focus its investment on answering questions around: plant performance and how that impacts on various farm irrigation systems; system-level sustainability: and tools for irrigators, water suppliers and policy makers to measure change. Research will be commissioned to provide either new information (smart science) or development; ensuring that the new information can be readily used by practitioners, planners and policy makers.

Delivering Sustainability through Risk Management

Milestone Report - August 2004

Any future expansion of irrigated agriculture in Australia is likely to occur in northern Australia. The region of Australia north of the tropic of Capricorn has abundant water resources — over 60% of the nations surface water run-off (NLWA 2001). However, there are concerns that in the rush to develop this new bonanza we will simply make the same mistakes that plague existing irrigation systems. These include: water logging, salinization, soil acidification, erosion, (more)...

Changing Irrigation Systems and Management in the Harvey Irrigation Area

Milestone Report - End of Stage 1 - February 2004

The project is examining issues of water use efficiency (WUE) in the South West Irrigation Area (hereafter called the Harvey Irrigation Area). A significant WUE issue is whether water savings, improved pasture yields and farm productivity can be achieved through sprinkler (centre pivot) irrigation of dairy pasture in comparison with traditional surface bay irrigation (often called flood irrigation). This project is a case study conducted on (more)...

Changing Irrigation Systems and Management in the Harvey Irrigation Area

Final Report - February 2006

The Harvey Water Irrigation Area (HWIA) is Western Australia’s prime irrigated dairying area supplying Perth and the south west with more than 40 per cent of its milk. Irrigated agriculture commenced in Harvey with the establishment of a weir in 1916. Since that time, pastures have been watered through surface irrigation of paddocks which over time have been leveled and divided into irrigation bays. When this project was envisaged in 2001, there were no centre (more)...