Issues facing growers
Australia’s variable climate and rainfall leads to crop yield variability from season to season.To remain profitable, grain producers must manage agronomy, crop inputs, marketing and finance to match each season’s yield potential.
How they make these decisions differs from grower to grower. While intuition works well in many seasons when the season is unique or unusual, experience and intuition can break down leading to a loss of productivity and profit.
Being dispassionate and even-handed and using data means a greater likelihood of the right decision to produce maximum profit and minimum risk.
Response
GRDC recognised the potential of a computer model that simulated crop growth according to seasonal conditions and assisted growers with risk-management decisions.
Yield Prophet® was launched in 2004 as a simplified version of the Agricultural Production Systems Simulator developed by CSIRO, State of Queensland and University of Queensland.
Today Yield Prophet® is operated as a web interface by Birchip Cropping Group to generate crop simulations to assist farmers in deciding on applications of crop inputs to meet potential yield in a given season.
The simulations allows growers and advisers to:
- forecast yield
- manage climate and soil water risk
- make informed decisions about nitrogen and irrigation applications
- match inputs with the yield potential of their crop
- assess the effect of changed sowing dates or varieties
Example
Wimmera mixed cropper Rodney Pohlner has used Yield Prophet® for six years. The system has provided reassurance for him to continue with his farming strategy. According to Rodney it has lifted the performance of average paddocks into great paddocks.
“A real strength of using Yield Prophet® is that it gets you thinking in a different mindset. It makes you question your point of view,” Rodney said.
“Often, Yield Prophet® has been the difference between asking the right and wrong questions when making decisions, and it’s also meant that I don’t second guess myself.”
The future
BCG, CSIRO, and GRDC are developing a project that combines the new Bureau of Meteorology POAMA seasonal forecasting system with Yield Prophet® to assist grain growers to improve their management strategies to climate variability.
Developers are looking at ways to make Yield Prophet® more available and user friendly with a Yield Prophet® web app and a Yield Prophet® dashboard to provide easily accessible data to aid quick decision making.
Private weather stations and soil moisture probes will be added to improve the model’s accuracy even more.
It also has the potential to be an extension tool to gain understanding of the effects of farm management decisions around greenhouse gas emissions.
