MOUNT Compass landholders will be able to access hourly weather and soil data to aid irrigation and pasture management decisions this season, through a partnership between landholders and Natural Resources SA Murray-Darling Basin.
Soil-moisture monitoring equipment and a weather station established by Natural Resources on two dairy farms will provide weather and soil information to help farmers make improvements in water use and nitrogen efficiency, as well as pasture and crop management, supporting improved productivity, profitability and reduced greenhouse-gas emissions.
The Mount Compass weather station is part of a statewide Automatic Weather Station monitoring network, which includes 40 weather stations across the SAMDB region and provides irrigators with climate data including air temperature, humidity, soil temperature, crop evapo-transpiration and wind speed, automatically uploaded to a publicly available website every hour.
The information can be used to decide when and how much to irrigate and to support other decisions such as the application of foliar sprays and frost-risk monitoring.
The soil-moisture monitoring site has been surveyed using electrical conductivity sensors (known as EM38) to identify soil variation and to plot the best four locations for the soil-moisture monitoring equipment across the paddock's different soil types.
This monitoring will enable farmers to compare graphical soil-moisture data and soil-tension data.
Through this project, farmers, agronomists and local contractors will have the opportunity to review the effects of climate, rainfall and irrigation on the region's common soil types.
Information from the Mount Compass site will be available with monitoring data from similar equipment installed at Langhorne Creek and in the Mallee.
For more information contact Jeremy Nelson at Natural Resources SAMDB: jeremy.nelson@sa.gov.au or DairySA NRM technical specialist Monique White: monique@dairysa.com.au
Visit http://www.aws-samdbnrm.sa.gov.au/ and click on any of the monitoring sites to see the weather data for that location. Username 'samdb', password 'demo'.
Winter tips, tools
Making the most of winter pastures and the Countdown Shed Guide for mastitis management are just two of the resources available from Dairy Australia and covered in the Winter Dairy Farmer Update.
Within the context of the three basic pasture-management strategies of grazing between the second and third-leaf stage; leaving a post-grazing residual of 4 centimetres to 6cm between pasture clumps (equivalent to 1500 kilogram to 1600kg dry matter a hectare); and maintaining a constant cover of green leaf area all year.
DA's Getting the Best from your Winter Pastures fact sheet discusses late-autumn and winter cover management, grazing management on wet soils, topping pasture before grazing, and summer post-grazing residuals.
Head to www.dairyaustralia.com.au and click on the Dairy Farmer Update - Winter 2015 link.
SA Gala Dinner
Save the date: Thursday August 6.
Join your industry colleagues in celebrating the winners of the 2015 SA Dairy Awards at this gala event.
Details: More information at: http://www.dairysa.com.au/news-events.aspx
