Irrigated crops

Irrigated crop production in South Australia is impacted by:

  • increasing droughts and heatwaves
  • limited water supply
  • poor water quality.

Our irrigated crops program addresses these constraints.

Research areas

The group undertakes research on sustainable use of water resources for:

  • irrigated annual crops such as vegetables and hemp
  • perennial crops such as grapevines, almonds and citrus.

We also develop strategies for enhancing irrigation efficiency and water productivity. This helps reduce the impact of agricultural land use on the quality of soil and water resources.

Irrigated crops has 2 subprograms.

Horticulture

We target sustainable horticulture production and resource management. Capabilities include:

  • improving production, increasing water savings and reducing nutrient wastage through productivity strategies
  • minimising the impact of reduced water volume and quality on irrigated horticulture using drainage science and technologies
  • developing methods to return orchards to full production following drought and bushfire events
  • using automated ground and aerial remote sensing systems to characterise canopy metrics for large scale experimental plantings
  • evaluating genotypes, densities, and planting systems to improve orchard productivity and resource efficiencies
  • improving almond irrigation scheduling by matching water requirements to canopy size (see video below)
  • developing irrigation strategies informed by calibrated simulations of rootzone water, salinity and nutrient dynamics
  • analysing the impacts of agriculture on natural water catchments and assisting in SA water allocation with hydrological metrics.

Our researchers are known for successfully developing superior apricot varieties to boost the Australian fresh market and dried industries.

Viticulture

Our focus on increasing the resilience of SA vineyards includes:

  • measuring advancement in the timing of vintage to understand current and expected impacts of climate change
  • developing irrigation strategies to manage vineyards during and following dry winters, where rainfall has not refilled the soil profile
  • developing a smartphone-based system to assess grapevine water status and guide irrigation decisions
  • using experimental modelling and field trials to assess strategies for managing vineyards during heat waves
  • assessing rootstock performance over decades to determine their long-term productivity, and resilience to salinity and reduced irrigation
  • evaluating the interaction between clones and the environment to determine if they can help adapt to climate change.

Transcript

- In the Riverland, it's an irrigated horticultural region.

Water is a major production cost.

They are very concerned about using that water as efficiently as possible.

Scheduling irrigation is a major challenge.

- Almonds are deciduous, and so there's a period where water requirements increase pretty rapidly, because you're going from no water requirement with no leaves to maximum leaf area.

- It's around putting the right amount of water on at the right time to meet the trees' needs.

There's a range of methods that growers can use to help schedule the irrigation.

- Soil water monitoring allows you to monitor what's in the banks of the soil.

People do use weather data.

- The other factor that interacts with that a lot is the size of the canopies.

We can measure the size of the canopy in a number of different ways.

We can take to it with a tape measure right through to satellite imagery.

They don't get collected that regularly, but the pixels in that image are quite large.

So you don't only get a tree, you also get the interrow.

Similarly, you can fly a drone or a UAV across an orchard.

What we were interested in doing is finding an easy automated way of measuring canopy size.

- Part of this is about being able to collect that imagery and process it and generate some crop coefficients, which is really the relationship between our orchard and the general weather conditions.

- So the plan for the project was to ground truth.

Okay, how effective is this system likely to be?

- Roughly 40 cameras across the orchard.

They're in different varieties.

They're in different tree spacings.

So we can understand the impact of those factors on the canopy development.

- That image would get collected every day, go into SWAN Systems, be processed.

- An estimation of light interception by the canopy.

And we can calculate a fairly accurate estimate of how much water that canopy is using on a particular day.

- Growers are busy.

Irrigation is just one of the competing factors on their time.

- We're hoping that growers will see value in it and take it up as not necessarily their primary irrigation scheduling tool, but one of their tools that they can use.

- Then we will go back to our partner SWAN Systems and say, "Okay, look, we now have something that you can integrate into your software and can become a a product that you could actually start selling to growers.

Or it can be part of the suite of products that you offer to growers."

- That extra information is invaluable in planning and understanding exactly what's going on.

Collaborations

The irrigated crops program works closely with these SARDI programs:

  • agronomy
  • crop improvement
  • plant health and diagnostics.

Strong linkages are maintained with other research agencies, including:

  • the University of Adelaide
  • the Australian Wine Research Institute
  • the CSIRO
  • NSW DPI
  • Agriculture Victoria
  • regional viticulture and horticultural associations.

Experimental plantings are located at the Nuriootpa and Loxton Research Centres, as well as on grower and company properties.

Contact

Associate Professor Paul Petrie – Program Leader, Irrigated Crops, SARDI
Phone: (08) 8429 3692
Email: paul.petrie@sa.gov.au

Tim Pitt – Horticulture
Phone: (08) 8429 2299
Email: tim.pitt@sa.gov.au

Dr Marcos Bonada – Viticulture
Phone: (08) 8429 2280
Email: marcos.bonada@sa.gov.au

Page last reviewed: 24 Oct 2023

 


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