Riverine Plains Blog

Key messages

• The International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC) is a global certification system that verifies sustainability principles for biobased food, feed and renewables.
• ISCC certification is voluntary, however, growers can gain export advantages and access premium prices.
• Participating farmers can be audited, so it’s important to be able to produce documentation that supports your declaration if required.

Key messages:

• always have a clear purpose for collecting on-farm data and understand how it can be used to make decisions, for example informing fertiliser strategies, livestock breeding programs and soil amelioration
• good quality data is critical to making informed decisions
• ensure that you will be able to access your data, even when changing consultants or machinery suppliers

Key Messages

• Pulse crops are under pressure due to current wet conditions and disease
• Brown or green manuring pulse crops may be an option this spring 
• Brown/green manuring can increase soil nitrogen, provide weed control options, help conserve moisture & improve soil structure and improve subsequent crop gross margins.

Perhaps trafficability has created difficulties with fungicide application and disease management has become problematic in your pulse crop. Or maybe specific weed issues have recently come into focus?

Key Messages:

• Carbon is present in the soil in many different forms.
• Including a pasture phase and pulses/legumes in the cropping rotation is essential to improve soil organic matter and nitrogen levels, promote microbial activity and ultimately increase soil organic carbon. 
• Evaluating management practices to increase soil carbon is necessary to ensure they are economically viable for a farming business.
• Several environmental factors (rainfall, evaporation, solar radiation, and temperature), as well as soil type, nutrient availability and land management influence maximum soil organic carbon storage capacity 

 

What Is Soil Carbon?

Soil carbon can occur in organic and inorganic forms.