Cropping for Plant and Soil Health Field Day

Unearth solid, practical tips on how to build soil and plant health while broadacre cropping.
Join us on the 1st October near Goondiwindi QLD. 9am - 3pm with lunch and morning tea provided.

Farmer Will McInnes will talk about his plant and soil health ‘wins’ and how he got there with things like seed dressings and companion planting

Biological agronomist Marco Giorgio Rego will give a presentation on strategies to maximise biological relationships between minerals, microbes and plants.

Brooke Sauer, Head of Research & Development at Boolah Pure Network and Sarah Fea, Soils for Life’s agroecologist will join Marco and Will for panel discussion with plenty of time for questions.

After lunch we will look at the soils and crops in two paddocks with different soil types. Will is going to share the paddock history and his strategies to improve soil structure, maximise gas exchange, water infiltration, biological activity, nutrient acquisition and crop performance. We will talk about effective monitoring strategies you can adopt on your place to assess outcomes and inform decisions.

Will
Will is a vibrant young farmer with plenty of practical experiences to share. He farms with his parents near Goondiwindi where they run cattle and grow wheat, barley and sorghum on what Will calls ‘melon hole country’. Will studied engineering at University and returned to the family farm in 2014. He took on management in 2016. His curiosity into how to improve soil health was triggered after he went looking for how they could make crops more resilient to frost after some promising crops were hit hard several years ago.

Marco
Marco is the Business Development Manager and head agronomist at NTS. His passion for regenerative agriculture was inspired by his grandfather who regenerated an abandoned 25-hectare property into a well-established forest. Marco studied agriculture in Brazil and before moving to Australia in 2017, and was part of a project implementing farming practices to increase profit whilst improving soil health. His journey at NTS started as farm manager of two research farms, experience that has contributed to his practical approach as an agronomist.

Sarah
Sarah is an agroecologist with over 30 years of experience supporting individual farmers and small groups to transition their management mindsets and practices towards improved soil and landscape health, utilising in-field observations and fit-for-purpose lab tests. Her purpose, her “WHY”, is to help farmers manage freely available resources - soil, water, sunshine, air, soil micro-workforce, human community - to enable their most effective functionality. Sarah thinks the one conversation that unites us is “achieving restoration of soil functionality”

Brooke
Combining her research, farming systems extension and precision agriculture consulting experience & skills, Brooke is a well-respected digital ag consultant. She has a broad understanding of various farming systems and is Research and Development Manager of the Boolah Ag Services 435ha trial farm which is "collecting commercial scale validated 3D data sets that are informing the future of sustainable and regenerative farming".

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We’re partnering with Macintyre Ag Alliance to deliver this event as part of our Cropping Resilience project, partly funded by the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund.