Hyper Yielding Crops

Hyper Yielding Crops is a major agriculture initiative that aims to maximise cropping yields in high rainfall areas. Funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) under the leadership of the Field Applied Research Australia, the Hyper Yielding Crops project will inform the setting of attainable grain yield targets in regions where there is the potential for high yield cropping.
 

Background

Conducted over the 2020 to 2024 growing seasons, the project involves 5 GRDC Centres of Excellence located in Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania, and New South Wales. A series of Focus Farms and Award paddocks associated with each Centre of Excellence was established and monitored for demonstration, comparison, and extension of crop management practices for optimising yield.

CeRDI developed the online data management and reporting platform for the Focus Farms and Award sites in partnership with key collaborators including Field Applied Research Australia, and Techcrop.

Across the life of the project, farming groups have included Southern Farming Systems (in Tasmania and Victoria), MacKillop Farm Management Group (in South Australia), Riverine Plains Inc. (in Southern New South Wales), Delta Ag (In Central NSW), and Stirlings to Coast Farmers (in Western Australia).

Outcomes

The online platform supports the collection and management of data over the five grower seasons. The online platform includes a customised web interface to capture, manage and report on the paddock data for the project.

Using the data captured through the platform, annual paddock information summary and performance reports are generated by the system and provided to growers participating in the project.

Innovation

The platform aggregates various data sources to automate an extremely detailed, anonymised, illustrative, and informative report cards.

This has resulted in 368 unique reports being created for the HYC Award participants to date.

Technical Features

The platform incorporates tools and functionality, including an intuitive, user-friendly dashboard to support project management and monitoring of data.

Wide-ranging data is collected from the paddocks and uploaded to the platform.

Data sources include paddock history, location metadata, paddock regions, detailed paddock inputs and treatments, laboratory soil and grain analysis, weather data, trial photos, in-season crop metrics, post season crop metrics, and product prices.

Curation and validation of the various datasets is made possible via an assortment of tools to ensure the award winner and rankings for each region are verified as correct.

The following video, prepared by GRDC, provides further information about this initiative: https://youtu.be/UYYgzv_9ttA