Celebrating World Soil Day 2024

World Soil Day highlights the importance of healthy soil and promotes sustainable management of this vital resource.

This year’s theme, Caring for Soils: Measure, Monitor, and Manage, aligns perfectly with the University of Southern Queensland’s (UniSQ) latest research into soil health and agricultural resilience.

At the forefront is Dr Alice Melland from the UniSQ Centre for Agricultural Engineering.

She is currently leading a Soil CRC-funded research project, Soil Water Storage: Increased Access and Tools for Assessment, aiming to improve the scientific understanding of how soil properties influence crop water availability.

“We hope that beyond this project, a better mechanistic understanding will then lead to better prediction of the impact of changing soil management on plant water availability and crop yield,” Dr Melland said.

“Better prediction can be used to help farmers decide whether changed management is likely to provide sufficient benefits to the cropping system to justify making the change.

“More informed decisions around the efficiency and impacts of soil practice change on crop water availability will help support cropping industry resilience to climate variability and change.”

Dr Melland emphasised that the research embodies the World Soil Day 2024 theme.

“We are developing and applying novel field measurement methods for diagnosing the most limiting soil constraints to crop production, and we are monitoring the impacts of changing the way soils are managed on plant available water and crop yield,” she said.

The research is a collaborative effort, with project works at field sites with farmers and other researchers across northern Victoria and central west and northern New South Wales. The initiative involves partnerships with DPIRD NSW, Central West Farming Systems, Riverine Plains, Farmlink, and Federation University.

Learn more about this vital research here.