The outcome of this investment is to improve grower and advisor confidence in nutrient management decisions by employing easy to use handheld NIR devices coupled with online tools that provide indications of the nutrient status of cotton crops for optimised fertiliser decisions.

Achieving high yielding cotton requires optimal crop nutrient management. In addition, overfertilization presents the industry with both environmental and significant cost risks to production.

One of the key challenges in utilising soil and plant samples for crop nutrient management is complexities and associated delays in collecting, processing, and analysing samples. Because of this, it often meant the value of collecting samples to generate the appropriate information was devalued. Recently, there has been a surge of investment in portable near-infrared (NIR) spectral instruments that offer the opportunity to collect real time information of the nutrient status of soil and plant material.

Specifically, the investment will:

• Test the current validity of NutriLOGIC algorithms for providing N crop requirements.
• Improve NIR calibration algorithms for micro and macro leaf and petiole nutrients that can also be linked to NutriLOGIC or other software.