Resource Conservation

Sustainable resource management focuses on reducing input waste while maintaining or improving overall yield. This requires transitioning from broad, blanket applications to high-efficiency, targeted systems.

Some Water Conservation Strategies

Water conservation involves maximising water use efficiency, which means producing the highest possible yield per megalitre (ML) of water applied.

• Precision Irrigation Infrastructure: Moving away from high-evaporation methods like flood irrigation or overhead impact sprinklers. Instead, producers install subsurface drip lines or center-pivot systems fitted with low-energy precision application nozzles (bigger droplets mean less evaporation). This delivers water directly to the plant root zone, minimising wind drift and evaporation loss.

• Soil Moisture Monitoring: Installing digital capacitance probes throughout production zones. These probes log real-time data on how deep water is penetrating the soil profile. Managers evaluate this data to ensure they only irrigate when the soil really needs it (reaches its refill point), preventing waterlogging and deep drainage losses.

• Recycled Water and On-Farm Storage: Capturing and treating production runoff, turning it into class A recycled water or accessing class A recycled water from municipal sources. Minimising evaporation from existing farm dams by constructing deeper storages with smaller surface areas. This also protects existing reserves.

Energy Conservation Strategies

Modern agriculture relies heavily on non-renewable energy resources like diesel and coal-powered grid electricity (some grid electricity is renewable). Reducing this reliance lowers both greenhouse gas emissions and operational costs.

• Transition to Renewables: Replacing diesel-powered irrigation pumps and generator systems with solar arrays. In grazing systems, this can be combined with agrivoltaics, where solar panels are elevated high enough to allow livestock to graze underneath, providing the animals with shade while generating clean energy.

• Variable Speed Drives (VSDs): A VSD adjusts the motor speed to match the exact pressure or flow rate required, cutting energy consumption significantly. This is very useful for pumps, refrigeration units, and irrigation systems and reduces the cost and environmental impact of continually running an electric motor at 100% capacity .

• Minimum Tillage and Fuel Reduction: Utilising zero-till or minimum-till seed drills. By passing over a paddock only once to slice a slot for seed and fertiliser rather than ploughing the dirt multiple times, a grain grower significantly reduces the total hours a tractor runs, conserving diesel.