Previous Soil CRC research has explored the opportunities for consumer and financial markets to reward on-farm soil stewardship practices. This project will further examine and summarise the market mechanisms and opportunities to capture and distribute financial returns from soil stewardship.

To ensure a holistic analysis, the research will cover both existing markets, including consumer, finance, property and insurance, and emerging markets, such as biodiversity and carbon credit and offset instruments.

The project team will synthesise findings from earlier Soil CRC projects in Program 1, as well as new published literature. They will also analyse the challenges to market activation and will carry out smaller strategic studies to fill remaining knowledge gaps, including:

• articulation of soil health indicators for use across the value chain in market activation
• effects of changing soil management practices on property prices.

Importantly, this research is guided by input from farmer groups, financial market participants and value chain stakeholders to ensure the outcomes address the needs of end and next users.

The new knowledge gained in this area since 2017 will be captured in a comprehensive report outlining the incentives available for soil stewardship practices. The information will be further tailored for farmers, property valuers, banks, and soil researchers.

Providing targeted information about the range and magnitude of available incentives is intended to assist decision-making and ultimately increase the uptake of soil stewardship practices.

Farmers and their on-farm management strategies are critical to the ongoing health of Australia’s soils, economy, and environment. Continuing on from the Soil CRC’s previous research into what drives farm management decisions, this project will help develop a longitudinal understanding of farmer practices, aspirations and motivations. It will consider the actual and intended practice of a broad base of farmers across Australian farming systems.

In this phase of the research, the project team will conduct three follow-up social benchmarking surveys of land managers in North Central Victoria, on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia and in the northern West Australian Wheatbelt.

Co-developed with local Soil CRC partners, the surveys will address regional and industry nuances of different farming group regions, while also providing a means to evaluate the impact of the CRC. Workshops will be used to ensure the ongoing relevance of the surveys for local groups.

Improved understanding of farmers’ needs, intentions and practices will help the CRC (and the farming groups) to better target our innovations and communications. This will increase end-user engagement and adoption with the aim of improving soil management and productivity.

Charles Sturt University’s analytics team will further help to identify avenues for data application.

Understanding what drives farm management decisions can help guide strategies for farmer engagement and increase investment in new ideas, technologies and approaches aimed at improving soil management and productivity.

To build this understanding, the Soil CRC has surveyed thousands of Australian landholders across six farming regions – North Central Victoria, Central West NSW, the Western Australian Wheatbelt, Tasmania, South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula and the Wimmera region of Victoria.

This project will complete the second round of the Soil CRC’s social benchmarking of rural landholders to enable a longitudinal understanding of farmer practices, aspirations, and motivations.

The final three follow-up surveys have been co-developed with local Soil CRC partners in Central West NSW, Tasmania, and the Victorian Wimmera region to address regional and industry nuances. The project team will run workshops with local groups to ensure the ongoing relevance of the surveys.

The knowledge gained from this research will help the Soil CRC and farmer groups to better respond to farmers’ needs and will further inform strategic planning into the future, as well as help to evaluate the impact of the Soil CRC in these regions.

The economic, environmental and social benefits of regenerative agriculture have not yet been fully defined. There is a need to better understand the interactions between the development of healthy ecosystems (such as soil health) and the production of high-quality food and fibre.

This project will develop a framework that can be used to assess a wide range of economic and social impacts of agriculture, allowing comparisons among different approaches. The project will use a case study design that builds on the existing Soil CRC project Regenerative farming systems that has been working to quantify the effectiveness of regenerative farming systems to improve soil performance across defined soil and climate constraints.

Researchers will develop the integrated framework by conducting three activities:

• Desktop review of economic and social literature on regenerative agriculture practices and methodologies to value their impact.
• Develop a definition of what regenerative agriculture means for Australian agricultural enterprises and its potential benefits through qualitative and quantitative approaches.
• Build six selective farm case studies – one each from six different regions to examine the

economic, social and environmental co-benefits of adaptive regenerative farming management and how this is specifically linked to healthy soil practices.

The result will be a relevant, practical and usable decision support framework for farmers considering transitioning to regenerative agriculture.

While the biophysical benefits of incorporating organic wastes as fertilisers into soils are known, the financial impacts are less well understood. In particular, the wider and combined financial impacts of using organic materials as fertiliser are poorly understood and communicated to farmers.

This project will assess the cost effectiveness of using waste products such as manure, dairy farm waste, compost and biochar as an organic fertiliser. It will be tested in broadacre and other cropping systems in New South Wales in the first instance.

Using organic materials as fertilisers has numerous financial and environmental benefits but also potential costs and risks. Economic research in this area is rarely undertaken as suitable data are dispersed or not available. This project will work directly with farmers, filling gaps with modelled information. It will be based on investigating scenarios of how farmers can increase productivity and farm income using organic fertilisers in comparison to inorganic fertilisers.

This project will help farmers understand the economics of applying organic fertilisers derived from waste, thereby leading to greater uptake and application of recycled organic materials.

Farmers often use smell to assess soil because the volatile compounds produced by biological activity are affected by soil conditions. There is evidence in the scientific literature that eNoses (electronic smell sensors) can detect volatiles that are related to soil biological activity and that eNoses may be a suitable way of assessing biological function.

A previous Soil CRC project Smelling soil proved it was possible to build a low-cost electronic eNose for measuring soil gas emissions and detecting changes in soil conditions.

This project will continue the development of the eNose focusing on two areas. It will build a robust device suitable for field use and it will investigate the relationship between eNose data and significant changes in soil condition. The project will undertake a range of pre-commercialisation activities to ensure a product for commercialisation and adoption by Australian farmers.

This project aims to address the issue of costly and time-consuming laboratory soil health measurements to provide farmers with affordable rapid in-field solutions without sacrificing accuracy.

The healthy functioning of agriculture ecosystems primarily depends on soil organic matter (SOM), which is often difficult to measure directly. The activities of soil enzymes facilitate the SOM decomposition, which releases plant-available nutrients, such as nitrogen. Therefore, the measurement of soil enzyme activities as bio-indicators, can provide quantitative information on SOM and microbial health.

This project will develop an innovative, field-based tool kit to rapidly determine soluble SOM and key biological functions through expanding the current investment in the Soil CRC project Affordable rapid field-based soil tests.

The project will extend the current colourimetric protocols to include measurements of enzyme activity, soil organic carbon, and additional biologically mineralised nutrients via rapid field-based soil testing ‘lab-on-a-chip’ technology. The colour results will be captured using a smartphone camera with an application that will automatically convert them into quantitative information using ‘lab-on-a-phone’ technologies.

The prediction accuracy will be improved significantly by minimising the impact of interferences using chemometric methods. The project will advance the current soil measurement technology and provide novel, affordable and rapid in-field measurement tools for day-to-day use. It will benefit farmers by having quick, cheap tests that can measure soil organic carbon on site and accurately.

Previous Soil CRC research has shown that land managers use a range of indicators and observations to assess soil performance and limitations to production systems. This project builds on this research and the ‘Matching soil performance indicators to farming systems’ project, which identified what indicators work best for different farming systems and regions.

The aim of this project is to produce an enduring resource on key soil indicators, including target and range values, that can be used and adopted by advisors, growers, grower groups, soil and land management researchers and government.

The research will better define critical target values for soil performance indicators across a range of agricultural settings. It will also explore what these indicator values mean for users and the sustainable management of different soils and production systems.

A co-design process with domain and regional experts will support the development of relevant metrics for indicators that matter to land managers. This process will help identify combinations of soil type, climate and land use and link these to locally relevant management practice information for soil performance. These metrics will then be linked to relevant corrective actions and management options to improve soil performance and health.

The project team will use a spatial framework-based approach to ensure there is strong alignment with other Soil CRC projects, including ‘Measuring soil microbes’, ‘Next generation tools to engineer higher performing soils’, ‘Visualising Australasia’s Soils: building a legacy’, and ‘Market mechanisms for improved soil stewardship’. This will focus on limitations to soil performance and prioritisation of management actions to optimise performance for indicators that matter.

Co-design and expert guidance will ensure that the research outputs, including relevant interpretations, fulfill users’ needs, are actionable, and have value for the Soil CRC and beyond.

This project will provide farmers and their advisers with tools to help them make the best possible decisions in nutrient and water management. It will develop sensor technology that enables detailed measurement of soil nutrient status and supply, through the soil profile and across the field.

This will provide unprecedented insight into the nutrient status of their soil and the mobility of these nutrients under irrigation and rainfall scenarios. With this technology the distribution of nutrients through the soil profile can be better controlled to maximise both farm profitability and environmental sustainability.

The efficiency of nitrogen applied in-season (e.g. at planting) is low throughout the northern cereal cropping regions. This is attributed to low nitrogen mobility through the soil profile. Yields in these situations are then constrained by low subsoil nitrogen. In these regions, nitrogen management and cropping decisions extend over multiple seasons to build and maintain subsoil nitrogen reserves. In high rainfall regions such as New Zealand and Great Barrier Reef coastal catchments, the mobility of nitrogen is high throughout the profile and so nutrient management decisions require greater focus on leaching potential. Here, nitrogen application must be closely monitored and continually matched to crop demand throughout the root zone.

The ability to cost effectively measure soil nutrient status will be significant. However this addresses only part of the problem. Correct decisions also require understanding soil nutrient supply and dynamics under irrigation and climate scenarios. The development of nutrient sensing technology must be closely linked to sensors that can extend these measurements across the field and through time (i.e. dynamics, soil supply and crop demand) of which soil water status and retention characteristics are highly significant factors. The sensor technology and algorithms that we will develop in this project will be the mechanism by which information on nutrient status and dynamics can finally be provided to farmers and their advisers – enabling a step-change in soil management practices for both profitability and environmental sustainability.

Across its four programs, the Soil CRC is producing a great deal of new data. This project will ensure the reliable storage, sharing, analysis and visualisation for all this soil related data.

Through co-design and trial with Soil CRC projects, the project will develop guidelines, process and policies that support discovery and re-use of research data. This will make it easy for researchers, farmer groups, growers and advisors to contribute soil data including sensor data streams into automated and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) systems.

Research will explore how near real-time in-field sensor and other soil data could be used with Soil CRC related data analytics, modelling, decision support and visualisation dashboards.

Soil data that is both spatially and temporally explicit will help researchers use the data for foresight and allow multiple outcomes from data. This becomes important for farmers as being able to use soil data for decision-making is critical to them optimising their soil productivity.

The costs and time required for traditional soil sampling and chemical analysis can be significant. Many farmers would conduct more soil testing if they had rapid, cheap and reliable in-field soil tests to support their decision making.

The Soil CRC’s project ‘Affordable rapid field-based tests’ has developed a prototype of a field-based toolkit for measuring soil pH and nitrogen, using microfluidic chip technology (‘lab-on-a-chip’). The device will allow GPS mapping of soil testing data to existing soil and geological information, which will help enhance the meaning of the test result. This device is simple and relatively inexpensive.

A related colourimetric calibration tool using smartphone cameras has also been developed. The prototype of the smartphone app uses the phone camera to capture results from the colourimetric measurement of the reactions on the microfluidic chip. This app can automatically interpret the colour values into the quantitative prediction of targeted soil nutrients using calibration models.

The project will undertake commercialisation and market studies for the devices’ design and cost. If fully developed and integrated, the final devices should attract significant commercial interest, especially from organisations that supply soil testing services to farmers. Ultimately, farmers will have access to a faster, cheaper and reliable alternative to conventional soil tests.

The Visualising Australasia’s Soils (VAS) project aims to provide Soil CRC participants with access to considerable volumes of reliable quality soil data. It will be sourced from a federation of soil data custodians who share their data according to the rules they set, therefore maintaining control.

The first phase of the project has produced a working internet portal that supports the 16 farmer group participants in their data needs. The second phase of the project will focus on providing tangible benefits to the project participants, especially the farming groups in the Soil CRC. The ultimate goal is to co-create an enduring component of an Australasian soils knowledge system that is self-sustaining and inherently useful for research and education, and ultimately, farmer decision making.

Access to the data will benefit Soil CRC research and industry partners by ensuring that all research builds on the best available and most current data sets. The continued participation of the farming groups from the first project phase, and the inclusion of new ones, is evidence of the project need, with all the farmer group partners in the Soil CRC now included.

Large scale agricultural systems rely on inputs of nitrogen and phosphorous which can be costly for farmers. Although phosphorous is significantly present in many agricultural soils, the majority exists in strongly adsorbed or insoluble inorganic forms and is not readily available to agricultural crops.

Every year, large quantities of organic waste streams that are rich in these nutrients are produced globally. The total quantity of phosphorous from various waste streams in Australia is around 20 times higher than the current agricultural demand. There is a particularly strong need to recover phosphorus from waste streams due to its dwindling availability from traditional rock phosphate sources. As well as this, the nutrients present in organic waste streams can pose a threat to the environment by nutrient enrichment causing problems such as surface water eutrophication.

This project will develop and optimise novel technologies to recover essential nutrients from organic waste streams such as poultry manure, pig manure, dairy farm wastes, sewage and industrial effluents. This will be done using an energy efficient process thus providing farmers with an efficient, cost-effective fertiliser solution.

This has to be accomplished through inexpensive, locally-sourced nutrient reserves and innovative technologies to ensure cost-effective cultivation and enhanced productivity. The waste-derived fertiliser products will be assessed across a range of farming systems and soil types.

One of the expected outcomes will be increased crop productivity in Australia, which will make contributions to global food security directly and through technology generation.

Enhancing nutrient use efficiency in agricultural soils is challenging due to diminishing natural resources such as phosphate rock and water availability. The use of organic wastes (e.g. composts, manures, biosolids) as soil amendments can potentially reduce the dependence on naturally available materials.

Maintaining and enhancing soil fertility are key issues for sustainability in an agricultural system with organic or low input methods. This project will study the effect of organic amendments on nutrient release in selected soil and cropping systems under different soil management practices. It aims to explore how organic amendments can unlock tightly bound soil nutrients, enhancing nutrient use efficiency (NUE). The project will also establish innovative approaches to apply organic amendments in agricultural soils and examine ways to make the nutrients available for plants through moisture retention and nutrient mobilisation.

Water treatment processes in Australia and globally generate millions of tonnes of biosolids, which are rich in nutrients and organic matter. These biosolids have long been used as soil amendments and as a source of nutrients and organic carbon, helping to maintain soil structure as well as minimising soil acidity problems.

More recently, an increased recognition of the presence of emerging contaminants (especially PFAS), and their link to human and environmental health problems, has led to constraints on the use of biosolids in agriculture. As a result, millions of tonnes of biosolids are being stockpiled globally, limiting its use as a source of nutrients.

This project will confirm whether the pyrolysis process (heating without oxygen) developed by South East Water can be used to convert biosolid waste into biochar to be used as a safe nutrient source and soil amendment for agriculture. The research aims to determine whether this process will convert toxins into either non-toxic forms or remove organic emerging contaminants, thereby ensuring safe use of biosolids as biochar in slow-release fertiliser.

The project also seeks to evaluate the effects of biosolid biochar on plant growth, soil ecosystems and the benefits on land application, as well as demonstrating the sustainability of biochar under varying soil conditions.

The research results will be critical for both the water and agriculture industries in Australia, as they will allow them to recycle and reuse the nutrient elements in millions of tons of biosolids. It may also provide a viable, cost effective and safe source of fertiliser and amendments to increase the productivity and health of Australian soils.

Pests and insects are causing significant damage in agriculture all over the world, requiring significant application of pesticide and insecticide. For example, the cane beetle damages the productivity of sugarcane by feeding on roots and stems, causing losses in hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The traditional application of insecticides has resulted in a large residue of pesticides in soils and surrounding environments, damaging soil enzyme activity and impacting nutrient availability. Key enzyme activities could be improved by controlling pesticide residue to a minimum level.

Nano-porous materials have the potential to encapsulate pesticides and improve their efficiency by controlled release of the active ingredient, thus minimising pesticide residues and damage of soil functionality. This project aims to examine nano-porous materials (either natural or carbon-based materials) as potential carriers to improve pesticide delivery. This will be done through glasshouse evaluation using imidacloprid and cane beetle control as examples.

This is critical for the effective control of cane grubs as well as improved soil performance. Upon development of materials, extended application to other pesticide active ingredients can be evaluated for wider benefits to other agricultural practices.

This project will engage sugarcane famer groups from HCPSL and Burdekin Productivity Services to develop a controlled release insecticide system through collaborative research activities in organisations including University of Newcastle, Griffith University and University of Southern Queensland.

This project will develop a pesticide product that can efficiently control cane beetles using cost-effective, low residue, controlled release of a pesticide delivery system. Following glasshouse evaluation, the product will be demonstrated to farmers groups for future field trails, and manufacturing companies.

Farmers can potentially save resources and gain productivity, reducing economic losses due to cane beetles. Soil functions, such as enzyme activity and nutrient bioavailability, can be improved through limiting the residue of pesticides in soils.

Crop productivity is generally lower on sandy soils than on loam and clay soils under the same environment and technology. Sandy soils cover over 11 million hectares of agricultural land in southern Australia. The focus of most research to improve performance of sandy soils is on their limited capacity to supply water and nutrient resources to the roots of crops.

While sandy soils vary across a continuum, they have a number of distinctive limitations including poor pH buffering capacity, low biological activity, low water holding capacity, high water repellence, and a high susceptibility to compaction. These all combine to limit crop production.

This project proposes that step changes towards high performance sandy soils will come from permanently raising their reactive surface area, with added clay or recalcitrant organic matter or both. The project will design a long-term, multi-site field program for improvement of sandy soils with clay and organic amendments. The results should help farmers to manage their sandy soils more productively.

Previous research has shown that doubling production on these soils can be achieved but that the mechanisms are poorly understood. Due to the high potential for benefit to growers, it is important to understand ameliorative processes to identify the most cost effective treatments.

Soil structure – the three‐dimensional arrangement of organic and mineral complexes and pore space – has a significant effect on nutrient and water transport, which affects plant performance. Alkaline dispersive soils dominate crop production throughout south-eastern Australia and are subject to severe structural degradation. These soils exhibit poor soil-water-air ratios that limit effective root growth, and as a result, yields are significantly reduced which is a major opportunity cost for growers.

Current strategies for the management of structural stability in Australian soils are mostly short-term measures aimed at minimising salt effects on plant production. More effective amendment formulations are needed to address structural instability and aggregates that slake, swell and disperse when wet. This project will use recent advances in soil-based nanomaterial manufacturing, biochar technology and soil microbiology, to design innovative organic-based amendments that will improve soil structural stability in alkaline dispersive soils.

A range of practices including sub-soil manuring, gypsum application and use of ‘primer-crops’ have been tested to address soil structural constraints, but the results have been unreliable and even resulted in financial loss to growers. Despite the demonstrated step change in crop yields that can be achieved by subsoil manuring, implementing this change in the industry has been limited.

This project has the potential to revolutionise the amelioration of multiple soil constraints by developing an improved formulation of organic-based amendments that has applications to several soil types and the broader agricultural industry. There are also significant opportunities for new industries using recycled organic waste to enhance the efficiency of conventional soil amendments. This will allow a major step forward in closing the yield gap in Australia.

Crop diversity in major cropping systems in Australia is limited, yet diversity in farming systems is recognised for providing multiple benefits including resilience, weed and disease suppression and improved soil health. To reverse the decline in species diversity in cropping, this project will identify rotations that enable profitable integration of a range of species into farming systems.

This project will determine how soil performance and profitability are affected by increased crop diversity in rotational systems in both broadacre grains and sugarcane industries. It will investigate the potential for plant-based solutions to improve soil performance through rhizosphere modification.

In glasshouse and small plot trials, the project will identify differences in root exudation and rhizodeposition, and root depth and distribution, between various crop types and link these to changes in soil biology, porosity and nutrient cycling. These ultimately contribute to the soil’s ability to sustain healthy, high yielding crops.

Long term (greater than 5 years) field experiments will assess the viability of integrating diverse species into the system as winter rotation crops, summer cover crops or perennial legumes depending on the constraints of climate, soils and weeds. Long-term field trials are essential as it has been established that outcomes from rhizosphere re-engineering are not immediate and improvements in productivity and resilience are not seen in short-term experiments.

The project will involve direct adoption of agronomic practices by Grower Group networks and beyond which will deliver improved soil health, increased soil resilience to stressors and improved farm profitability.

The impact of the project will be enhanced soil resilience leading to more profitable and sustainable grain and sugarcane farming systems through the use of diverse cropping rotations.

This project aims to trial, measure and demonstrate crop sequencing and new technologies that can sequester organic carbon, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and improve soil fertility in crop production systems that have traditionally struggled to accumulate carbon.

Four large-scale field trials will be used to assess soil management and amelioration technologies, and various crop sequence approaches will be utilised to build soil carbon and improve soil health.

The project seeks to determine if these new soil management practices can enable growers to participate in carbon trading schemes.

Calcareous soils are prevalent across south eastern Australia, occupying 60% of the cropping soils in the region. Calcareous soils are high in calcium carbonate which results in multiple constraints including low phosphorous, low water holding capacity, poor nitrogen cycling, high rhizoctonia burdens, severe fertiliser toxicity during germination and extreme pH, sodicity and salinity at depth. These can all result in severely limited crop productivity.

With co-investment from GRDC, this project will examine soil limitations in calcareous soils in innovative ways and within a farming systems context so that the outcomes will be realistic and easily implemented on farm. It will develop innovative physical and chemical management packages which are expected to include activated and nutrient enriched organic matter and chemical amendments to manipulate pH and redox potential. It will also provide information on threshold levels for constraints in highly calcareous soils and may use novel amendment products being developed in other Soil CRC projects.

The ultimate aim is to improve the soil conditions on calcareous soils and increase water use efficiency and crop performance.

This project aims to quantify how the diagnosis and management of soil constraints changes soil water attributes such as infiltration, storage, drainage, and crop interaction.

Through field site data collection, installation of sensors, use of proximal soil sensing and critical review, this project will develop calibrated soil water characteristic models for each site and the relevant systems-based treatments. This information will be collected at existing Soil CRC field sites.

The Soil CRC has field-sites where systems-based approaches and novel physicochemical approaches are being investigated in order to deliver high performing soil. There is an increasing demand to better understand how these various approaches are changing both soil water infiltration and storage, drainage, and root access to stored water and resources.

The data will be used to develop tools that support growers to manage their soil to increase access to soil water, as well as assess changes to soil water in the future. Long term forecasts will be developed for each site that can be validated throughout the lifetime of the Soil CRC.

The mechanisms that control soil water change the most will be identified. These will inform decision support tools and allow a level of forecast capability through crop modelling. These outcomes will provide more certainty around in identifying management practices for better soil water use and increased production.

Calcareous soils occupy about 60% of the cropping soils in south-eastern Australia, and more than 1.1 M ha of South Australian cropping areas are highly calcareous. These soils have a range of constraints limiting crop production and the effectiveness of improved agronomic practices.

This project will build on the legacy of a previous Soil CRC/GRDC project, ‘Overcoming soil constraints in highly calcareous soils’, which developed innovative physical and chemical management packages to improve conditions on calcareous soils.

Co-funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation and Primary Industries and Regions SA (PIRSA), the current project aims to provide integrated and sustainable soil phosphorus management strategies to farmers and advisers dealing with highly calcareous soils. Poor phosphorus nutrition is a major constraint to improved crop productivity on these soils because the effectiveness of conventional phosphorus fertilisers is very low.

In the previous project, a ‘carbon coated mineral’ (CCM) was one of the best performing strategies to increase crop growth in highly calcareous soils when applied in the topsoil. This was attributed to the more superior delivery of phosphorus to the crop compared to conventional fertilisers. The current project will further investigate CCM and biochars to improve soil phosphorus delivery and crop production.

The project team will conduct glasshouse pot experiments followed by two replicated field trials across two growing seasons in South Australia’s upper Eyre Peninsula. Data will assist with the development of a suite of universal next-generation soil constraint decision-support tools.

This project will develop solutions to enhance phosphorus delivery and use efficiency in highly calcareous soils, thereby enabling farmers to increase their productivity and profitability in this challenging soil type.

This project aims to find the best ways to manage multiple soil constraints, such as sodicity, acidity, and salinity, to help farmers make informed soil management decisions that maximise productivity and profitability.

There are different ways to manage constraints in isolation, but deciding which method to use and when can be challenging. This is due to the high variability in the responsiveness of soils to ameliorants where multiple soil constraints exist.

To tackle this challenge, the project proposes a computer-based approach to optimising soil constraint management. Known as a knowledge-guided machine-learning modelling framework, it uses scientific understanding and learns from existing data to predict which combinations of soil management will work best for a particular soil affected by multiple constraints under specific conditions.

The project team will engage growers in this research to cultivate early adopters and ensure that the eventual universal decision-support tool will be used by the industry. Such tools will improve soil function and capacity across Australian agriculture while enhancing productivity and profitability.

The project will also standardise and use data from published studies and Soil CRC’s past and current experiments to ensure the data will be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR).

This research builds on two Program 4 projects: Improving decision support systems, which improved the representation of soil constraints in various decision support tools; and Diagnosis frameworks for multiple and complex soil constraints, which developed a diagnostic framework for multiple and interacting soil constraints.

As farmers better understand the importance of sustainable soil management for their productivity and profitability, they need advice, technical assistance and expertise from their local grower groups.

This project is co-funded by the Australian Government through the Building Landcare Community and Capacity component of the Smart Farms Program. It will deliver increased soil technical capacity and capability in grower groups, Landcare groups and NRM organisations, both within and outside of the Soil CRC.

The project is building technical capacity of these groups to deliver soil health information to farmers. It is leveraging the significant skills, expertise and collaborative partnerships within the Soil CRC to build the soil health technical capacity of these groups.

Three communities of practice (CoPs) have been established across Australia, each one made up of 10 participants from groups in areas of common interest. The three CoPs cover the West – WA; South – SA, Vic, Tas and Southern NSW and North – Northern NSW and Qld.

Of the 30 groups that are represented, 15 are farmer groups and 15 are NRM organisations. Nineteen of the participants are from groups outside of the Soil CRC. They have analysed the existing soil science knowledge, skills and confidence of the participants and where they currently source knowledge on soil science practice and trends.

Each of the three CoPs are developing a capacity building plan that best addresses the gaps and needs of the individuals within each CoP and the CoP as a whole. These plans will reflect the existing knowledge bases of individual participants, the needs and priorities of the groups for whom they work, the delivery needs of the projects that they are responsible for (i.e. Smart Farms projects), and the soil and farming systems issues of the region.

In the medium term, these three communities of practice will have positioned themselves as knowledge hubs driving adoption of sustainable, productive soil stewardship at the farm level.