Optimising irrigation and nutrition management for bankless systems

The overall project objective is to develop integrated irrigation and N technology sensing and automated control technologies so that best practise guideline principles can be developed and refined for optimising water and N inputs in different designs of bankless surface irrigation layouts. Reducing upfront costs and increasing flexibility of implementation together with recent research and technology advances are encouraging growers to install bankless systems for labour, water and energy efficiency that are more profitable for each ML of water used. Coincidentally, irrigation performance influences the efficiency of fertilizer being taken up by plants by affecting the uniformity of water both spatially and at depth and consequently the scheduling of fertilizer to the crop. Since on average, about a third of applied nitrogen is lost in conventional growing systems, which costs the industry approximately $32 million each year, there is opportunity to reduce these losses and improve N recovery, through linking fertilizer sensing and application to watering schedules. The Australian cotton industry is committed to continued improvement in nitrogen fertilizer use efficiency (NFUE) towards meeting carbon sustainability targets. At present, however, despite bankless irrigation systems being more widely adopted, there is no specific information available for the industry that discusses the overall efficiency of N applied using these new layouts. Therefore, this project aims to achieve increased farm profitability by optimising water use and reduced environmental impact by increasing NFUE in bankless systems.