Biomass Business
Biomass Business is a project funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI-2) under its ‘Applications” Program and “Agriculture, Natural Resources and Climate Change” sub-Program. Biomass Business also bridges across two other core CRCSI-2 Research Programs: Program 1 (Positioning) and Program 2 (Automated Spatial Information Generation).
The project seeks to develop, evaluate and integrate new knowledge, measurement and interpretation protocols and knowledge/data access systems based on field-scale, quantitative measurement and mapping of biomass in its many forms (including animals)- a common theme reflecting the inextricable link between increasing agricultural productivity and the need to secure landscape diversity and health. In effect, Biomass business” is precision agriculture taken to a new, broader level.
Precision agriculture (PA) is defined as a spatially-enabled, integrated farming system designed to increase long term, site-specific (within-field) and whole farm production efficiency, productivity and profitability while minimizing unintended impacts on the environment. In reality, PA in Australia has primarily focussed on tools aimed at improving profitability in the grains industry. After almost 20 years of access to low-cost GPS, the introduction of on-ground sensors capable of measuring crop and soil attributes and compelling, supportive economic evidence (Allen Consulting, 2008; Brennan et al., 2007), only a few percent of Australia’s grain growers use PA; an industry that is forecast to contribute $15.4 billion in export earnings (2008/9). This slow adoption has resulted from a combination of factors, including a dearth of truly-functioning decision support tools, a mismatch between PA products and user expectations, and, as identified in a recent GRDC workshop, a lack of engagement of end-user/service providers in demonstrator activities. But Australia’s response to climate change requires PA tools for improving water and fertiliser use efficiency (reducing GHG emissions), maintaining the quality, quantity, stability and biodiversity of woody and non-woody plant species and reducing land degradation and PA is key to solving the problem. And industry, and peak funding bodies, research providers and educators are all waking up to this. Biomass Business is an example. In bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of world class researchers and end-user public and private land managers including NSW DECCW, WA Landgate and three of Australia’s top-ten corporate farmers; Sundown Pastoral Company, Twynam Agriculture and Milne AgriGroup, Biomass Business will demonstrate how we can broaden the existing PA agenda in Australia.
Biomass Business encapsulates three, interwoven themes (objectives):
a. formulating enterprise-relevant, spatially-enabled measures of water and fertilizer use efficiency in crop and animal production, including plant canopy-based indicators of fertility status and biomass, and develop the tools necessary to acquire these measurements;
b. creating large and small scale tools for managing livestock on grazing lands, including rangelands, based on spatially-enabled measures of pasture growth, availability and grazing dynamics; and
c. exploring and establishing techniques for data acquisition and fusion to describe vegetative carbon and biomass across entire production enterprises (farmscapes), including the development of high-definition carbon and biomass inventory tools for farms.