Rob O'Connor, an experienced Irrigation Officer with DEDJTR works with Accelerating Change on all things irrigation, including scheduling. Rob shares with us, below, lessons learnt from the project about soil moisture monitoring and the use of moisture probes, and the value of using ET data to schedule irrigations. Lessons learnt about soil moisture monitoring Soil moisture probes have been used on the partner farms under different forages in 2015-16 and through the recent wi

Working with our farmers, we delivered a Soils Constraints Road Trip in July, taking participants to three different sites in the Tatura-Stanhope region to look at different structural soil issues and ways to address them on farm for improved productivity. The Road Trip was delivered by soil scientist, Christian Bannan, who took farmers through issue identification and possible practical remediation actions in an interactive format. The feedback from the day indicated that th

Accelerating Change has been busy over the winter months setting up technical extension activities and continuing measurement and monitoring activities on our Partner Farms where possible, incorporating winter feeds into the mix. Difficult wet conditions for our farmers have also limited how much pasture accumulation and nutritive data we could collect so, like everyone, we are looking forward to seeing some drier paddocks in spring. Our monitoring and measurement strategy wi

Accelerating Change, in partnership with Tactics for Tight Times and the Gardiner Foundation, ran two Summer Cropping Workshops this month to get farmers thinking about how they could get the most value from maize or sorghum crops in their respective dairy farming operations. Together, Matt Nihill, Cropping Agronomist from Landmark, and Lisa Birrell, Murray Dairy Extension Officer, discussed the agronomic, financial and nutritional considerations of growing a good crop and ef