Did you know?
Good plant moisture status is critical in the first 20 days after flowering to allow potential fibre elongation rates.
Full Final Report
The primary aims of this project were to contribute to the CRC strategy to improve the efficiency of applied nutrients by 15 percent by facilitation to co-ordinate the public and private nutrition research and extension effort for the cotton industry. To meet these objectives and to provide operational flexibility the project was divided into 4 major areas of responsibility, Co-ordination/ Administration, Research Proposal Review, Extension and Training, Decision Support Information Integration.
A two pronged approach to this situation was discussed and decided at the initial Nutrition Group Co-ordination Meeting. This strategy consisted of developing programs to highlight current NUE and another making available training to improve awareness of strengths/ weaknesses and technique to ensure most reliable outcomes from soil analysis.
There still appears to be a wide variation in the understanding, skill and ability to manage nitrogen nutrition across the cotton industry despite significant effort over a considerable time span in the life of the industry. This appears to have been a result of lack of economic consequence for “getting it wrong”, mixed messages from research, lack of a risk x economic framework for crop nutrition decision making. In the last 12 months of the project, significant increases in the cost of nitrogen and phosphorus supplementation from manufacture N products, greater potential penalties faced for poor nutrient use efficiency and the decline in the cotton price/fertiliser price ratio compared to other crop option has see grower who have had the water to continue to grow cotton reassess their approach to nutrient management. More rapid response to change will need to be a component of future crop nutrition extension. This will only be possible with greater efficiency in dissemination of information to remain relevant in rapidly changing physical and economic environment. The underlying fundamentals required to meet this challenge is to raise and standardise base skills. This will require all those who interact with cotton growers about soil fertility management and crop nutrition to be up-skilled using the latest verifiable and endorsed information. In this project progress was made in this direction with standardisation of sampling procedures, development of workshops on soil testing and updates to Nutripak, however the as the pace of change of input costs and environment imperative increases so too does the importance and complexity of decision making.
