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24.01.2022 It's a great time to be a soil scientist and to have such a variety of interests in soil. I have a concern. There are many mantras in farming now. Most of them have great ideas. They all have special labels and can be a bit like a religion, a system of beliefs as much as fact. My advice. Try what works. Don't close your toolbox of options for land management. They are many and varied. Look at your soil and landscape health first however you do that and production gains will normally follow. Make your own soil mantra and taylor it for your specific patch of soil. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

24.01.2022 This is a Yellow Sodosol. This soil type is generally renowned for its low productivity and for being waterlogged when moist, no available water when dry, and the time in between moist and dry is normally a few days. This limits growth of most plants which grow in Sodosols. Water can get into the sandy topsoil, but soon hits the B horizon of heavy clay which disperses, stopping water from entering lower horizons and being available to plants. The topsoil is often very acid an...d the deep subsoil is highly alkaline. Often this soil is found in a degraded condition in lower rainfall areas of Australia. Some graziers however have been able to turn this around with the introduction of a suite of very deep rooted pastures and legumes, hard work and good grazing management. The result of managing for 100% groundcover, addressing nutrient deficiencies and deep aggressive roots, is that the normally dry B horizon gets opened up by roots, forms small aggregates and allows water to cycle deeply in the soil. This also allows plants to cycle nutrients from formerly unused deep subsoil. Carrying capacity is increased 8 - 10 fold and the soil produces a lot longer going into drought than untreated Sodosol lands and less acid organic matter rises and thickens in the soil. The amazing changes that have happened in one of Australia's worst soils, where soil change and formation is thought to take 10 - 15 000 years, can happen in under 10 years. Just goes to show that, with a little understanding of soil resources and matching plants to the landscape, we can make large changes to the resilience and health of a grazing system.

24.01.2022 Sometimes erosion gullies are useful. This area of badlands near the Warrambungles records in its layers at least 5 soil formation episodes. The upper 2 m or is like a library of the progress of indigenous Australian technology (artefacts) from the time they arrived till now. The top few cm have European artefacts. This damage was done by one road culvert concentrating runoff. In this case a lucky bit of erosion and a window to the past.

24.01.2022 New Enterprise Getting the right soil for the job is critical an example from Citrus and others. Much of the time these days, farming and grazing is as much about innovation as crop and stock management. We see this quite often with the development of new enterprise such as the olive industry, or the budding citrus industry. It is wonderful to see people thinking about what they can do to diversify their current enterprise, or to change enterprise successfully because ...Continue reading

21.01.2022 Salinity A Dangerous Cancer or a Rising Opportunity? One of the environmental buzz words we see on television, at field days and in the papers these days is Salinity. Salinity is touted as the land cancer of the future. When we see pictures of broad expanses of once productive cropping lands in southern Australia it makes us shiver to think that we may be looking at the same fate in northern NSW. Salinity is a many headed beast. It is driven by a lot of sometimes ver...Continue reading

19.01.2022 Hi SoilFutures followers. I now have a proper website. I invite you to visit http://www.soilfutures.com.au I would love to hear your thoughts.

18.01.2022 Soil as the basis for life. Below is an article I wrote years ago for the local paper in Gunnedah. The series that follows is a bit naive in some ways. The pressures on our world have increased dramatically. Climate change is now biting hard, the world population is still growing, and we really have been putting or heads in the sand. Nonetheless, the article and the series that follows still has relevance to today's challenges, and I believe that as we understand new cha...Continue reading

17.01.2022 My capability statement with some lovely photos and graphics. Enjoy

17.01.2022 Soil Tests and Soil Potential Using Lime as an example. Trying to understand soil test results is a vexed problem for many across north western NSW. Most soil testing is done on topsoil samples and only look for basic nutrients and deficiencies. To get the most out of soil test results, its important to understand more about your soil as a whole, especially within the whole of your root zone. Bulked surface soil tests may be masking the worst bits of your paddock, or pul...ling down the results where one part of the paddock is particularly poor. Many recommendations from soil testing are equally difficult to deal with. A classic example of this is the recommendation to regularly lime land to increase surface soil pH, to correct a calcium imbalance, or to fix a surface structure condition. Liming is important in some areas of the north west, particularly on acid sands which are common around the Pilliga Scrub, however much of our grazing and farming soils are high in naturally occurring lime. Many of the heavy clay soils in the region have an enormous lime content, and if you already have a high pH at the surface of your soil, often liming is the same as adding a teaspoon of lime to a semi trailer in terms of its potential impact on the agricultural system. Often where surface pH is high, there is lime in abundance however the problem is that the calcium in the lime is locked away from the soil mass by the high pH of the soil. There are many ways of making this lime available, through simple stubble retention, which will allow some humic acids to form at the very surface which will dissolve a portion of the lime, or even through the addition of acidic fertilisers. In pasture systems, whilst surface pH’s may be acid, often subsoils have high pH and are high in lime. It may be necessary to include lime on topsoils during sowing of pastures to allow germination. A well managed, and deep rooted pasture system will access this deep lime, allowing it to be cycled to the surface through leaf matter and dung. The take home message from this is always be careful with soil test results. They may not reflect your whole soil resource, and may even be misleading. Have a good look at your whole soil every now and then, not just the surface, and consider what resources lie beneath the crop or pasture root zone. You may be able to unlock them and have healthier, more productive soils as a result. One way to achieve this is to look at each major soil type on your place, and get in advice and expertise to help you find out what more your soil can be doing for you. See more

15.01.2022 These photographs were taken within days of each other in the same area with the same very limited rainfall for the past 12 months. Management of groundcover to 100% becomes totally crucial in a drought particularly. Although the scaldy site has a tremendous soil resource, there are no deep fibrous roots to get water into the soil and no groundcover to keep it there. Cover and roots are your rapid response unit to rain, maximising growth. Most soils offer incredible production opportunities, but without roots and cover, they may as well be rock outcrop.

15.01.2022 Soil toxicities are virtually an unknown issue in much of northern NSW however, they do exist and it is sometimes important to be aware of them. Normal agronomic soil testing probably will not tell you much about potential toxic substances in your soil as they are usually only taken from topsoil. Many of the potentially toxic substances in soils are in the subsoils, sometimes very deep down in the profile. Soil toxicities are usually caused by metals of some description, a...nd are generally a natural part of the soil chemistry in parts the north west. A common problem on the sandy soils of the Coonabarrabran district is aluminium toxicity. This is caused when soils become, or are naturally very acid. Aluminum toxicity happens where the acidity of the soil is great enough to liberate aluminium from its normally unavailable state so that it effects plants by retarding growth or even killing pasture species. If this happens, liming can help, or having better pasture species and pasture management systems that circulate lime from deep subsoils can be the answer. Many people who live in areas prone to aluminium toxicity are aware of the problem and are learning how to deal with it. There are other toxicities which are harder to nail down and which only occur at certain times. Some of the heavy black soils of the north west contain high levels of Boron, or even Selenium in their deep subsoils which are generally held unavailable to plants. Boron can effect plant growth and selenium can be taken up by plant roots causing strange behaviour in stock or even death of stock. Selenium toxicity on heavy soils is thought to occur generally when good rain happens after long dry spells in deep rooted pastures such as lucerne. A long hot dry spell makes these plants forage hard for moisture to depths as great as 10 m, drying out the soil profile over a great depth. This allows substances such as Selenium to oxidise. When the weather becomes wetter again, plant uptake of previously unavailable Selenium occurs, making the feed toxic in large amounts. In the case of sheep or cattle, they may exhibit a strange behaviour or even die if they get a big enough dose. Selenium may then have a permanent effect on animal behaviour. Locally one such suspected toxicity condition is known as the Coonabarrabran Staggers. The solution in the above case is to move stock to lighter country or to open up all paddocks and let them graze freely for a while. Stock tend to avoid the higher concentrations of Selenium in a paddock. The only way to be sure that you may have these potential soil toxicity problems is to do deep soil testing. It need only be a one off exercise, but if you know that you have a potential problem when the weather is right for it, then you can be prepared to manage your pastures, crops and stock accordingly. See more

12.01.2022 Maximising production and maximising sustainability can be the same thing. Another article which I wrote a while ago. I think that with the focus on farm mantras that are becoming popular, it is still important to look at soil first. We can't make it rain, but we can make our soil take more rain in when it does come. Sustainability is a buzz word of both agricultural enterprise and the environmental movement. It’s a bit hard to understand what is meant when people talk o...Continue reading

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