Less rain, more wheat: How Australian farmers defied climate doom

From the article:

The ability of Australia’s farmers to produce more wheat for a growing global population owes largely to a cluster of innovations since the 1980s that changed the seeds farmers plant, how they plant them, and how they cultivate the soil, many growers and researchers say. These advances have been turbocharged by Australia’s system of applied research, and by a relentless quest for efficiency among farmers who receive minimal subsidies.

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Farming in Australia has always been precarious. The weather swings between drought, heat, fire and flood. The soil is short of nutrients.

Western Australia, the top wheat-exporting region, has seen the biggest decline in average rainfall of Australia’s cropping areas over the past three decades, official weather data show. Rainfall patterns have shifted, with more falling in summer, when fields are fallow, and less in winter, when crops are growing.

The state also has some of the poorest soils.

“Imagine beach sand,” said Tress Walmsley, CEO of Perth-based seed-breeding company InterGrain, which develops wheat varieties that can better cope with Australian conditions. “These soils are nutrient-depleted, often toxic and water-repellent. And at the end of each season, the crop runs out of water.”

Thirst for water provided the spark for many of the changes in Australian agriculture. In 1984, scientists Reg French and Jeff Schultz calculated that in optimum conditions, after evaporation, Australia’s farmers should be able to produce 20 kilograms of wheat per hectare for every millimeter of rain during the April-to-October growing season — about four times what they were achieving.

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A key step was switching to no-till agriculture. Constant plowing to control weeds damaged soil and exposed it to evaporation, reducing the amount of water stored for crops.

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One drawback was that over time, farm equipment driven over untilled fields compacted the deeper levels of the soil, hindering water infiltration and root growth. To address that, farmers began to restructure soils, spreading lime to reduce acidity, then employing other kinds of heavy machinery.

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The ripper, and another device called a spader, a rotating cylinder with protruding shovel heads, break up compacted layers of earth. While plowing, ripping and spading are all tillage methods, no-till farming refers to eschewing the traditional practice of plowing to kill weeds and prepare fields for planting each year. Ripping and spading are less-frequent but bolder interventions, often performed at much greater depths. They change the structure and constituents of the soil, churning unproductive layers into a more-absorbent mix that better holds water and nutrients.

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Other innovations helped growers curb disease. They introduced new crop rotations, including canola, an oil seed also known as rapeseed, and lupins, a legume used for animal feed. Canola area shot from 50,000 hectares in Australia in 1989 to around 3.5 million hectares today, agriculture ministry data show.

Farmers began sowing two to four weeks earlier, sometimes in dry ground, so plants would flower at optimal times, Kirkegaard said. Sowing now starts around mid-April, giving wheat several months to grow during the southern winter and spring, when water remains available, so that it can mature before the summer heat arrives toward the end of the year.

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Those improvements helped Australia double its wheat exports in the last four decades to well over 20 million tons a year. Most goes to Southeast Asia and the Middle East, where populations have grown rapidly.