Frost mitigation in the Upper North

Lead organisation: Upper North Farming Systems

Hub members and partners involved: Barry Mudge Consulting, Agrilink Agricultural Consultants, Pinion, SAGIT

Focus area: Crop and pasture management, Soil and land management

Project Category: Hub Projects

This project is part of the GRDC Riskwi$e program.

The main themes UNFS will look to address for the RiskWISE project for 2024 will be focusing on:

• Crop selection and sequencing will primarily leverage existing information across long-term farming systems trials in South Australia and Victoria, which have a strong focus on complex decision making.
• Frost and heat effects: This sub-theme is included to identify, model, and understand key risks associated with climatic heat and frost effects on crops. This theme is influenced by both management strategies; including varietal selection and time of seeding, and climatic risk; seasonal outcomes of heat and frost, effects of autumn rainfall influencing emergence and flowering date. The impact of heat stress in spring, which has a large impact on yield cannot be reliably estimated prior to sowing but good decisions are made with a range of spring temperature conditions in mind. What is known is that as critical reproductive phases shift later in spring, the risk of heat stress increases. Crop and pasture species are largely spring types but sown prior to winter. While frosts are not predictable more than a few days in advance, the decisions are made weeks and months before. The damage from one hot day is never complete but the damage from one severe frost can be. The area impacted by frost can also increase exponentially with increasing frost intensity. Heat risk can be somewhat mitigated by sufficient PAW whereas frost damage is often independent of PAW status. Frost risk is more closely related to position in the landscape than heat risk.

This project is supported through funding from the SA Grains Industry Trust.