Project lead: Centre for Crop and Disease Management (Curtin University)
Project overview
Farmers are acutely aware of current and future risks to production posed by a drying climate. However, they often lack clarity over the ‘how and when’ to adopt changes to production systems.
This project aimed to enhance climate resilience in the eastern wheatbelt of WA by helping farmers and agronomists use farm data to improve profitability and sustainability at paddock, farm, and farm enterprise scale.
The project team developed an interactive app, the Yield Profitability Research Dashboard, which integrates yield data produced by agricultural machinery with economic models. The tool allows the visualisation of yield data by paddock alongside paddock statistics and weather observations, production data, profitability analysis, and the probability of yield exceedance.
The dashboard is a comprehensive tool for researchers to collaborate with farmers and advisors to understand within-paddock variability. It supports the diagnosis of yield constraints, associated management practices that may overcome them and the likely return on investment of any treatments applied.
Impacts and Results
Collaborating with growers in the eastern wheatbelt amplified the social impact of this research, fostering knowledge sharing between regions and connecting the lead farmers and agronomists through a community of practice.
The creation of the Yield Profitability Research Dashboard and codesign process demonstrates the business case for the development of a commercial capability to visualise and analyse within paddock variability. It is a foundational step in the establishment of a new Food Agility CRC research project, Agri Analytics Hub, which aims to make data-driven decisions easier for farmers. This project is a collaboration between CCDM (Curtin University), DPIRD, NGIS and Farmanco to develop opportunities to visualise within paddock variability, experiment, analyse results and predict return on investment and risk. The cohort of participants in this project will transition into the next project.
This project was funded by the Australian Government’s Agricultural Innovation Hubs Program and was initiated through the South-West WA Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub.
Additional resources
Data driven grain profitability through “on-farm experimentation”: grower driven experimentation and development of a new tool to understand fertiliser responses at paddock scale. A Food Agility CRC project.
Collaborators
