Wheatbelt theme for Bell at national conference

WATER USE efficiency has been pivotal to the output of Western Australian grain growers in recent years, says Murdoch University’s Emeritus Professor of Sustainable Land Management Dr Richard Bell.

Dr Bell will be the keynote speaker at next week’s Soil CRC Participants Conference in Perth, where he will promote the “remarkable” achievements of Wheatbelt farmers impacted by low rainfall and poor soil quality.

“Up until four years ago, WA was tracking at around 13 million tonnes of grain per year as its average output,” he said. “In the last three years, we’ve exceeded 20 million tonnes and look on track to do the same again this year – and under a variety of different seasons.

“It indicates we’re really on an upward trend here in terms of realising potential in a tough environment. A lot of that’s around soils, understanding soil constraints and looking at ways which we can more effectively use water that falls.”

Dr Bell said that a ‘more crop per drop’ philosophy, not just in WA but across the country, had encouraged growers to further explore water-limited yield potential.

However, current strategies to improve water use in WA had also stemmed from decades of monitoring and ameliorating subsoil constraints such as acidity, sodicity and compaction.

“Grain growers in WA are doing a pretty good job in that respect,” Dr Bell said.

Dr Bell said partnerships and collaborations demonstrated by SoilsWest and the Soil CRC meant the best-available soil management knowledge could be harnessed and communicated to grower groups, and directly to growers themselves.

Having joined Murdoch University as a post-doctoral fellow in 1984, Dr Bell started lecturing in land management in 1990 and became a professor in 2007. As a lead researcher, his areas of expertise are crop nutrition, conservation agriculture for smallholders, salinity management and managing and re-engineering of sandy soils.

Murdoch University is one of 10 major partners of the Soil CRC, which was established in 2017 to support farmers in making complex soil management decisions.