Baker Ag Advantage INVESTMENT IN SOIL AMELIORATION – ACIDIC SOILS
When choosing to undertake a lime program on your farm, it is important to consider a few anomalies in your paddock to ensure the maximum return for your investment. Whilst blanket approaches, for example of 2.5t/Ha when coming out of pasture, have worked really well in the past, changes in crop and pasture agronomy and farming techniques have led to our soils having variable pH or concentration of acidic soil throughout the top 15cm. Soil testing techniques in the past have focused on a 0-10cm test to give producers an idea of pH in this area, along with key nutrients such as Phosphorus, nitrogen and sulphur.
Agronomists and producers can then couple this with a deep nitrogen test (10–80cm) to gain insights into what nitrogen budgets and requirements may look like for the coming grain growing season. With the advent of minimum and zero tillage and drought (creating the reluctancy to cultivate), tillage (especially at depth) has become a rarity. Findings from many research organisation’s have shown that the advent of our farming systems has led to changes in how the soil pH varies in centimetre increments throughout the top 15cm of soil. Work by Farmlink and CSIRO have concluded that looking at the top 10cm for pH management is no longer suitable. The CSIRO
farming systems project at Greenthorpe (shown in Fig.1) highlights the variability in pH at depths down to 20cm.
The difference between the black line (pH in March 2017) versus the red line (pH in February 2020) shows an increase in pH for the 0–10cm component.
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