The GRDC National Risk Management Initiative is a 5 year program funded by growers through GRDC. MSF is delivering the project across the MSF region of SA, Victoria and NSW. Farmers are invited to participate in the project through on-farm research, demonstrations and group based workshops and activities.

This project aims to build on the information presented and the grower activities at VRT workshops where all participants selected a paddock on their own property and started to use public satellite NDVI data to establish their own soil zones to begin the VRT journey.

This project aims to provide “the why” behind the decisions SA farmers need to make in relation to adopting practices to address the range of SA specific soils characteristics, soil biology, subsoil constraints, soil nutrition dynamics, etc. It will do this by posing a series of specific questions about soils from an on-farm management perspective.

This project will demonstrate, evaluate, and communicate innovative farming practices to low rainfall farmers in the tri-state Mallee and Eyre Peninsula regions to enable them to implement farming systems that maintain ground cover resilient to the pressures imposed by climate variability and management actions.

Improve the capacity of farmers in the low rainfall Mallee and Northern Yorke region to correctly diagnose underlying constraints that limit the productivity of sandy soils, to select the most appropriate strategy or combination of strategies to ameliorate the soil constraints present, and to map soil constraint data at a paddock scale to better target costly amelioration activities.

This project will demonstrate farmer ready management practices that break the cycle of saline land degradation exacerbated by very dry or drought conditions. Two key drivers of soil salinity will be addressed – dry saline land and Mallee seeps that cause lost production in low rainfall broadacre mixed farming landscapes.