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2026 Western Australian Crop Sowing Guide
No full textThe 2026 Western Australian Crop Sowing Guide has been compiled by officers in the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development. It provides information to support variety decisions for each of the major crops for the upcoming season.https://library.dpird.wa.gov.au/bulletins/1368/thumbnail.jp
Clearing cloudy or coloured water on farms in Western Australia
No full textCloudy or coloured water can be a nuisance when used for household purposes, and sometimes be unsuitable for livestock, irrigation, or crop spraying. The following is for general information only, it is recommended that people seek expert advice for treating cloudy or coloured water
Potential economic impact of grapevine Phylloxera (Hemiptera: Phylloxeridae) on Western Australian winegrapes
No full textGrapevine phylloxera Daktulosphaira vitifoliae Fitch (Hemiptera: Phylloxeridae) has been present in Australia for almost 150 years but has not spread to south-west Western Australia, in part due to the relative isolation of the region. Recent improvements in tourist access, with interstate flights now arriving at Busselton Margaret River Airport, raise concerns about potential phylloxera introductions via wine tourism. In this paper, we simulate the potential economic impact on the Western Australian winegrape industry following a hypothetical arrival event in the Margaret River wine region. We use soil texture maps to assess the suitability of winegrape-growing areas to phylloxera establishment and construct a model to predict the likely cost and revenue implications of replanting vines to resistant rootstock as they become infested. Our results suggest that if strict quarantine measures to limit spread are not implemented, a phylloxera incursion could affect 60%–70% of vines and cause cumulative losses of AUD150–290 million over a 50-year period. This is equivalent to a 3%–6% annual contraction of winegrape production
Adaptive water body detection: Integrating deep learning, normalised difference water index, and vector data for farm dam water monitoring with OmniWaterMask
No full textFarm dams are important water security features supporting both agricultural production and the natural environment. In Australia alone, over two million farm dams provide the water resources underpinning rural and regional primary industries with an annual export value of $80 billion. However, monitoring these water bodies to understand water security and vulnerability is challenging, primarily because of their large quantity, size and highly variable spectral signatures. These characteristics result in difficulty determining thresholds for index-based water detection methods and add to the difficulty of creating adequate training datasets for deep learning methods. We present an adaptive approach named OmniWaterMask (OWM) that uses existing mapped water features to optimise the combination of deep learning outputs and a common water index (Normalised Difference Water Index, NDWI) to achieve robust water detection, for both agricultural and other water resources. OWM demonstrates strong performance across multiple datasets and spatial scales, achieving Intersection over Union (IoU) scores of 96.9 % (Sentinel-2), 73.8 % (Landsat) and 90.9 % (National Agriculture Imagery Program, NAIP). When applied to farm dam monitoring in Western Australia using Sentinel-2 imagery, the approach successfully tracks water extent across a range of dam sizes, with Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 587 m2 when using Sentinel-2 and 785 m2 when using PlanetScope. Our two case studies demonstrate the practicality and scalability of this approach by monitoring water levels in both a single dam and across 7,172 farm dams at monthly intervals over an 8-year period. This methodology enables reliable monitoring of small water bodies at scale, supporting rural water security assessment in increasingly uncertain climatic conditions. The open source OWM library is made available as a Python package on PyPI
A simple guide for describing soils, 2nd edition
No full textSoils are enormously diverse and can be very confusing to understand and talk about. This simple guide for describing soils helps to identify the most important parts of a soil profile and provide an easy way to understand and explain what you see. It gives you a step-by-step guide of what soil properties to describe and how to describe them, along with the tools to make basic soil classifications. The soil descriptors help you to identify the soil type and aid in assigning a simple and standardised name to the soil. While this guide is designed to link with a simple classification system already in use for Western Australia — Western Australian soil groups — the soil description standards used here are applicable everywhere.
This guide is suitable for anyone who is interested in understanding the basics of soil morphology, characteristics and description. Experts in other scientific fields, industry consultants, students and interested lay readers will also benefit from using this guide as a stepping stone to a more advanced understanding of soil.
This second edition updates key information resulting from new editions of the Australian Soil Classification, the Australian soil and land survey field handbook and the Western Australian soil groups: a diagnostic key to identify soils in Western Australia. It includes revised visual aids to classification using a simplified key based on soil supergroups and the WA soil groups, new diagrams that explain the exemplar soil types, and an updated glossary to match the references this guide relies on for technical information
Western Australia’s agricultural R&D ecosystem
No full textDecades ago, the agricultural R&D ecosystem in Western Australia (WA) was fairly simple with few funders and some key providers of R&D services such as the Department of Agriculture, CSIRO and the University of Western Australia. Since then, the agricultural R&D ecosystem in WA has increased in complexity with more R&D providers and a greater injection of industry and private funding. These changes have occurred against a backdrop of the total investment in agricultural R&D declining as a share of agriculture’s gross value of production. State and federal governments have reduced their share of the total investment in agricultural R&D. Despite the changes in WA’s agricultural R&D ecosystem, productivity growth in WA agriculture has remained impressively high. Many farmers and local consumers of WA agricultural products and foods continue to benefit from this productivity growth. A rising need amid WA’s complex agricultural R&D ecosystem is the provision of hubs, incentives and infrastructure that enables cost-sharing and enhanced scientific collaboration. An efficient and highly productive WA agriculture sector that can readily draw on R&D and innovation outcomes will help maintain export revenues and place downward pressure on local food prices
Test APPN Dataset
No full textDatasets on: The four-year surveys provide information on Diamondback moth (DBM), and larvae count in canola crops in different locations, the impact of the presence of DBM in Brassica green bridge, trapping methods, environmental influence on DBM population increase, effective insecticide information, favourable conditions of DBM moth migration, etc
Carbon footprint of carrots in Western Australia
No full textThis report presents the findings of a comprehensive carbon accounting study conducted on carrot production in the Myalup area of Western Australia.
The study reveals that carrot emissions are approximately 81 kg CO2e per tonne of carrot sold from the April harvest and 76 kg CO2e per tonne from the October harvest, when using rejected carrots for other economic uses. These figures represent competitive emissions intensities compared to international benchmarks.
Key findings include: Yield improvement is the primary driver for emissions reduction: Increasing productivity, without proportional input increases, offers the most effective pathway to lower emissions’ intensity while improving economic returns. Economic use of rejected carrots significantly reduces emissions: When rejected carrots are utilised for animal feed or juice production (a common practice among WA producers), emissions intensity decreases by approximately 14%. Nitrate-based fertilisers outperform urea: The use of nitrate-based fertilisers, which is already common practice among growers, results in lower emissions compared to urea-based alternatives. Waste management through composting: Implementing composting for organic waste reduces emissions by approximately 57% compared to landfill disposal. Renewable energy adoption: Transitioning to renewable energy for irrigation can reduce emissions by 17-27%.
The Western Australian carrot industry demonstrates competitive carbon performance compared to international producers, with opportunities for further improvement through yield optimisation and continued adoption of sustainable practices
The economics of safe stocking rates in Central Australia
No full textIn the semi-arid rangelands of Central Australia, research undertaken at the Old Man Plain Research Station (OMP) has shown that managing stocking rate at a safe utilisation level allows land condition improvement given two La Niña years in a row. The first year provides a high rate of vegetation growth and consequent seed and the second-year results in a recruitment event from the first year \u27s seed bank. The aim of this paper is to contrast the economics of OMP grazing strategies to an industry business-as-usual scenario. A bioeconomic model has been developed which encompasses a pasture growth model ; the GRASs Production (GRASP) model linked to herd structure modelling using Breedcow and Dynama. The herd performance and other baseline data was derived from industry consultation, whereas the OMP data was derived from published data from the research station. The analysis shows that there are economic incentives to run safe stocking rates. Besides the unequivocal environmental (land condition) benefits of running a safe stocking rate, the economic benefits are dependent o n the initial status of the station and how it transition s to a safe stocking rate. The analysis concludes that there are economic benefits of running safe stocking rates, however implementation should be carefully managed by pastoralists to maintain a positive cash flow
Western Australian and South Australian grain enterprise emission intensities and gross margins: a review
No full textDrawing on various datasets, crop enterprise emission intensities and gross margins are reported for the main broadacre crops grown in Western Australia and South Australia. Values are reported for various rainfall regions and across time, and for different farm performance groupings. As a generalisation, in each region, wheat and canola production display marked increases in emissions intensity across the study period whilst legume crops’ emission intensities increase far less. Wheat crops display upward emission intensity trajectories across time whilst displaying different rates of increase in emissions intensity according to regional rainfall. Canola demonstrates higher emissions intensities per tonne compared to cereal crops, with distinct emission intensity patterns across the different types of canola (e.g. Roundup Ready ® canola versus conventional canola). Canola emissions per tonne when compared to those of cereals show a stronger positive relationship with gross margins across all rainfall regions. Lupins generate substantially lower emissions per tonne compared to cereals and canola, whilst other pulses display a wide range of emission intensities. Regional differences in emission intensity trajectories are observed for several principal crop types, with farms in high rainfall regions often displaying the lowest emissions per tonne. Within the farm business population in each State some farms simultaneously achieve high economic returns at far lesser emissions intensity. These farms may exemplify feasible desirable pathways that other farms could follow. Improved gross margin and environmental objectives might be feasibly achieved for more farms via improved farm management, complemented with the development of cost-effective, emission-reducing technologies that deliver sustainable intensification without compromising economic returns