Wednesday 2 May 2012

70 mm goes a long way

We ended up getting 70 mm of rain which brought the land levelling to a screeching halt,we still can't get back on the paddock. When I went to have a look the next morning I thought that there would be some water in the pit, but did not expect a METER of water. My Nuffield study topic is intercropping , and in our case we have been experimenting with soybean as a sacrificial nitrogen source and an alternative for hebicide, due to the soy's shading out the interspace.We have been trying to understand (since 2002) the management between these two , we only used soy because we had the seed and thought we would give it a crack, but there are probably other legumes that might be better.There appears to be a lot of benefits to such a system, some things that we observed were, a lot more soil born activity ie; worms, beetles , centipedes, even with one fifth of applied nitrogen compared to the control the crop out yeilded in tonnes of sugar per hectare, and there were considerable costs reductions , applied fertiliser (one fifth) and herbicde was nil. The planter that was on the last blog is the one that will be used to plant interrow for the intercrop.

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