SoilsWest recently launched their second soil quality e-course, titled Understanding Soil and Plant Nutrition. Freely available through the online learning platform of Soil Quality Courses, this course will help you apply the knowledge from Course 1: Fundamental Soil and Plant Nutrition on your own farm.
- Collect the right data with confidence by designing fit-for-purpose soil and plant sampling plans and selecting the most useful tests for your purposes.
- Turn test results into better decisions by interpreting soil and plant tissue reports, using benchmarks and indicators, and applying basic statistics to understand trends and variability.
- Improve soil and crop performance by understanding key nutrient cycles and designing, running and evaluating on-farm trials to test practices under your own conditions.
Put your knowledge to the test with interactive quizzes that cover essential topic content and help answer questions such as:
- Why is potassium released much more rapidly from crop residues than nitrogen or phosphorus?
- What is the best place to start when choosing which soil tests to request?
- A farmer incorporates large amounts of crop residue but sees little increase in soil organic carbon six months later. Why?
- What question does plant tissue analysis answer that a soil test cannot directly answer?
- Why might applied nitrogen fertiliser be less effective in paddocks with a high cereal stubble load?
Bridget Watkins is the South-West WA Regional Soil Coordinator (RSC). The RSC project provides opportunities for researchers, primary producers and community groups to collaborate and share knowledge related to soil health and management. The project is supported by the Australian Government’s Climate-Smart Agriculture Program under the Natural Heritage Trust, and in South-West WA is led by the SW WA Hub in partnership with SoilsWest at Murdoch University.