Our Tarwin demonstration site in South Gippsland, Victoria aims to maintain soil carbon in a clay loam greenfield site which has been converted from pasture to a vegetable production system rotation, predominantly celery, spinach and leek.
To do this, we’re trialling a combination of different cover crops, compost and minimum till with host grower Adam Schreurs. The minimum till practices have been particularly successful over the recent dry summer period, and expanded from the trial area across the whole farm.
“One of the things that we’ve noticed and taken away from this trial, particularly this year being such a dry year, we were looking at conserving water … we decided to cut tillage right back for one reason to stop removing moisture from the soil,” Adam explained.
Previous tillage practices at the farm involved speed discing of crop residue, then deep ripping, then bed forming both ways and spraying to prepare for planting the next crop. With minimum till, Schreurs & Sons have been able to reduce the number of passes from five to two – applying a pre-emergent herbicide and just one bed form pass.
Adam highlighted: “We’ve used less fuel, less labour, less machinery hours altogether, to end up with the same result of crop [to previous tillage practices], and use less water. So that’s been a real win so far.”
You can hear from Adam here.
