Drought presents a significant threat to farming operations and the communities these operations support. Led by Stirlings to Coast Farmers the digital weather & soil moisture monitoring technologies extension/adoption project builds capability for landholders to implement and maintain these digital technologies allowing them to make adaptive, proactive farm management decisions, rather than current reactive decisions.

Backed by an impactful adoption & extension program, including interactive workshops & diverse information/training materials delivered throughout 25 million hectares of Western Australia, the project identifies methods of building drought resilience through improved weather monitoring & forecasting, soil moisture management & opportunistic land management practices. This will enable farmers to effectively manage operations season-to-season, and, most importantly, reduce impacts during & post-drought, enabling them to sustainably increase productivity & system resilience.

Project Background:

1. Climate variability and drought events present a real threat to farming operations. Increased rainfall and temperature variability have a significant effect on pasture and crop productivity. Water availability is a concern for many livestock operations, which are dependent upon sufficient supplies for animal welfare. This project is designed to drive adoption of on-property weather stations & soil moisture probes to deliver adaptive, “proactive” farm management approaches, rather than the current “reactive” approach applied, particularly in drought conditions. Essentially, better decisions (for climate and drought resilience) from better data (improved weather data and local forecasts, and soil moisture data).

2. Increased adoption of weather monitoring and soil moisture monitoring technologies for building drought resilience can be readily applied & translated across Australia, and across multiple industries, including horticulture, viticulture, dairy/livestock operations and grains enterprises (approx. 25 million hectares in WA alone). Beyond farming organisations, there is also a rising interest in citizen-science based projects which could utilise this improved weather and soil moisture data to lead to wider community resilience change/improvement.

3. Weather & soil moisture monitoring infrastructure isn’t a new technology or practice, with some of Australia’s leading product manufacturers operating 15+ years. Much research has been conducted to demonstrate the benefits of incorporating more accurate weather data & forecasts and soil moisture data into on-farm decision-making. For weather, proven benefits include increased productivity and a reduction in input losses, a reduction in financial volatility and better ability to manage climate change (Dept of Agriculture & Fisheries Qld, 2021). Soil moisture data is proven to be valuable in critical times, showing rainfall effectiveness, depths crops can access moisture (DPRID, 2022) and if subsoil constraints are limiting soil moisture uptake (Oster, GRDC 2016). Prior research by Stirlings to Coast Farmers (SCF) evidenced the opportunity for landholders to utilise soil moisture data for determining summer-cropping opportunities to build feed resilience in a varying climate.

4. Current research/development activities have not yet focused/led to broad-scale adoption by landholders. This project will solely focus on showcasing the benefits of these technologies by demonstrating the significant spatial variability, which makes conventional tools less reliable. Resulting adoption will allow landholders to effectively monitor rainfall infiltration, manage groundcover & stocking rates, time irrigation events, or define opportunistic cropping opportunities; enabling farmers to effectively manage operations season to season, and most importantly during and post-drought, enabling them to sustainably increase productivity & system resilience.

5.This project aligns with regional priorities located within the South-West WA Drought Resilience Adoption & Innovation hub for the South-West & Wheatbelt regions, including:

• Building industry digital capacity & literacy in digital agriculture,

• Improving the understanding of farmers’ attitudes towards managing seasonal variability and a drying climate, including identifying triggers for transformational change,

• IoT technology (which may include weather, soil and other sensor data) that will support farm management during variable seasons.

Activities:

Activity 1 (2023)- Resource Development – SCF will develop and implement an adoption & extension program with information materials, demonstration guides and learning activities that raise awareness of best practices for adopting and maintaining weather & soil monitoring equipment to build climatic resilience. Adoption materials generated will be broadly applicable to several makes/models for increased relevance, covering:

• weather-station & soil-moisture probe technology types available, and their associated strengths, maintenance/calibration requirements. In this, SCF will work closely with device manufacturers,

• benefits of locally relevant, on-farm weather & soil monitoring, against conventional external tools and data sources,

• how to utilise for drought monitoring, preparation & enable opportunistic land management practices and,

• case studies comprising of use-case scenarios & rainfall analysis across three enterprise types (grains, livestock/pasture production and viticulture), at a total of 10 locations in the Great Southern region of WA, to highlight regionally relevant adoption benefits.

Activity 2 (2024)- Workshops – a total of 8 workshops will be hosted, where event participants will be shown device types, features, maintenance/calibration requirements drawing on key resources/learnings developed from Activity 1. Workshops will be designed to be collaborative, practical to enable peer-to-peer learning. Participants will be surveyed for monitoring & evaluation purposes, with surveys designed to gauge current level of knowledge, the usefulness of information, and the likelihood of adopting the technologies to improve resilience.

Activity 3 (2023-25)- Extension Material Promotion – Resources and case studies developed in Activity 1 will be distributed through the SCF grower-group information mediums (e-news, newsletters, social media, SCF website), through other Farming/NRM groups, the Grower Group Alliances Newswire & associated member groups, and the regional SW-WA drought-hub nodes via electronic and print mediums. Content will be hosted electronically on the SCF website and ClimateGreatSouthern website incl. post-project.

Activity 4 (2024)- The creation and development of an “Annual Weather-Station Maintenance Awareness Day” – WA state-wide community advertising and promotion initiative to bring awareness of the importance and the benefits of, not only installing on-property local weather stations and soil moisture probes for climate resilience, but also calibrating and maintaining these stations and probes. Advertising will include resource links (Activity 1) to provide information/tools to drive adoption of maintenance and calibration practices. It is envisaged that after proven success of this ‘awareness day’ in WA, a resource package can be shared with other interested groups Australia-wide.

Publications