Date:

Thursday 17 April 2008

Time:

3.30 – 4.30pm (light refreshments will follow)

Location:

Room E2.113A, ATFI Building (Building E2), JCU Smithfield campus, McGregor Road, Smithfield, CAIRNS

Summary:

Sugarcane is the main crop grown in catchments of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, and the greatest user of nitrogen (N) fertiliser in these regions.

Concerns about reef water quality are focussing scrutiny onto the environmental impacts of agriculture in this area. At the same time, N fertiliser prices are increasing, leading farmers to investigate practices that minimise N fertiliser applications and maximise N use efficiency of their cropping systems.

Features of sugarcane cropping systems in Australia (i.e. deep rooted crop, infrequent fallows, significant cycling of N fertiliser in soil organic matter and large soil N stores) might combine to reduce fertiliser N losses from the system while maintaining productivity. A simplified N balance approach, called “N replacement”, for guiding N fertiliser applications has been developed to scope the potential for increasing fertiliser N use efficiency.

The N replacement approach has been field tested in multi year experiments established on commercial farms from Mossman to Murwillumbah in 2003 and 2004. The approach shows promise for maintaining sugarcane productivity and profitability, increasing N use efficiency and decreasing the N available to be lost from the system.

Speaker:

Tony Webster

CSIRO, Cairns

Presented by:

Australian Tropical Forest Institute (ATFI)

Contact:

Everyone welcome. A campus map with directions to the ATFI building can be downloaded (pdf file, 596 kb).

For further information and to RSVP for catering purposes, please contact Isla Grundy, Tel: (07) 4059 5008 or E-mail: isla.grundy@csiro.au