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BACKGROUND

The impact of land management practices on deep drainage and dryland salinity

The Condobolin and District Deep Drainage Awareness project is a joint project between Condobolin and District Landcare Management Committee, and CSIRO Land and Water. It was instigated in 2001, and received $24 000 in funding from the Natural Heritage Trust in 2002/03. The project aims to address the problem of managing dryland salinity through a combination of monitoring and community education, as well as identifying the different water efficiencies of standard crops and pastures.

Supporting work is also being carried out at the projects sites, providing ancillary measurements of soil moisture.

Real data from local farms

With this project the Condobolin and District Landcare Management Committee aims to provide relevant, local and real data for local farmers. The Deep Drainage Awareness project monitors soil moisture using modified gypsum blocks developed by CSIRO. The gypsum blocks can objectively measure levels of soil moisture under different land management practices. Data from the gypsum blocks is radioed several times a day to a local base station, which then transmits the data to this website each day via cdma telephone. For more information, see How the Measurements are Made.

Five farms around the Condobolin district were invited to participate in the project, generally on red soils of Bimble Box/Cypress Pine vegetation type. On each farm, the sensors are deployed in an annual cropping system, and an improved perennial pasture system (Usually lucerne), in order to demonstrate the differences in deep drainage between different land management systems.

A major outcome will be to make local data available to Condobolin District farmers about how different cropping and pasture systems are using rainfall, and at what times moisture is being lost beneath the root zone.

Supporting projects

The five Condobolin and District Deep Drainage Awareness project farms are also being used in a CSIRO Land and Water project funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC): "Objective measures for managing the risk of deep drainage". This project is looking specifically at whether measurements of soil moisture made below the root zone of annual crops can be used as a simple guide to whether deep drainage is occurring, and how land management affects the deep soil water store.

Measurements of soil water using the neutron probe method are also being made at four of the farms by NSW Department of Primary Industries as part of the CRC for Plant Based Management of Dryland Salinity project "High water use farming systems that integrate crops with perennial pastures". Measurements are made at monthly intervals and the data are also reported on this website.