In a recent announcement of successful project grant applications funded through the Federal Government’s Future Drought Fund (FDF), Mallee Sustainable Farming featured as one of the successful funding recipients.

This new project titled “Building farming systems resilience and future-proofing the impacts of drought through accelerating the adoption of proven cost-effective and yield responsive soil and fertilisers management practices by farmers across southern Australia” is funded under the FDF “Extension and Adoption of Drought Resilience Farming Practices Grants program”.

MSF Board Chair Steve Burt was excited to learn of the news; “this new project initiative helps cement MSF’s role in leading innovative projects across southern Australia, and involves working with a total of 10 farming systems groups”

“Given the amount of research work that has been conducted with our research partners including Frontier Farming Systems, CSIRO, UniSA and SARDI, it is fantastic news that we now have additional resources to target on-farm practice change across the Mallee and beyond” according to Steve.

In other pleasing news, MSF is also a partner in another successful project funded under the same program that has been awarded to the Ag Excellence Alliance. The title of this project is “De-risking the seeding program; adoption of key management practices for the success of dry early sown crops”, which will see MSF supporting a network of MSF farmer groups across SA, Victoria and NSW. This is on top of MSF also being part of the new National Risk Management Initiative funded through the GRDC.

According to Steve, these new projects will provide MSF with the opportunity to focus on supporting farmers in making better decisions on-farm when it comes to managing soils, managing on-farm risks and developing low-risk strategies for sowing crops early in the season for the next few years. “MSF are here to support Mallee farmers and communities in both the good years as well as the challenging seasons, and it is pleasing that we have the resources, people and importantly the strong commitment from farmers across the Mallee to support this work” concluded Steve.

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