ARDROSSAN agronomist and farmer Bill Long (pictured) believes the use of climate modelling to help predict extreme weather events, such as decile 1-2 or 8-10 rainfall years, will be invaluable to farm businesses.
Bill is one of 22 SA participants in the Carbon Farming Knowledge project, attending three workshops in 18 months to better understand climate models and potential carbon farming policy implications for farmers.
He said the project had reinforced his confidence in the ability of climate models to assist decision-making on-farm.
"The extreme weather events are the ones I want to know about, I can manage the rest in between," he said.
"It's about capitalising on the good ones when we know we can make money and battening down the hatches in the tough years."
Project manager Mark Stanley said that while climate modelling could help with season-to-season decisions, it also helped farmers plan for long-term change by improving soil carbon levels and nitrogen use efficiency.
"We've talked a lot about soil carbon and the value of it in the system - particularly from a nitrogen perspective," he said. "Nitrogen use efficiency is a significant issue with cropping. If you're increasing your nitrogen use efficiency in your crop you're reducing your nitrous oxide emissions - that means you're not only reducing your emissions from your farming systems, you're also using nitrogen more efficiently and converting that into grain or fodder.
"That whole area of nitrogen use efficiency is important in farming systems today because farmers in recent years have gone more and more away from having a legume in the system to just having cereals and canola. The use of artificial nitrogen has skyrocketed in the last decade and a half, and how efficiently that nitrogen has been used has always been questioned.
"Through our discussions we're not only addressing an agronomic issue, we're also addressing an emissions issue as well - so there's a double benefit."
