News

The Clean Coastal Catchment (CCC) project (see below for details) is looking for cooperating macadamia farms located within the northern rivers of NSW to be involved in monitoring nutrition use and evaluating its effectiveness on farm. This information will then be used as a basis for development of industry best practice nutrient management. 

NSW DPI through Jeremy Bright are seeking expressions of interest from macadamia farms located on the northern rivers of North Coast of NSW to be involved, and volunteer their orchard for monitoring and reporting. 

The site would also be utilised as a demonstration site at relevant MacGroups and field days relating to the CCC project.

NSW DPI is investing in monitoring equipment to be deployed on local farms to measure water and nutrient flow and potential losses of nutrition to the environment. This will later culminate in identifying best bet solutions for nutrition loss prevention.

Currently the pilot is set to run for two years with a view to extending a further 5 years. This will allow the project to observe any medium term changes in water and nutrient losses from the farm - especially given the huge impact rainfall has on topically applied granular fertilisers.

As a volunteer, your farm will be set up with a weather station, lysimeters (to measure nutrient loss), and capacitance probes which will be hooked up to telemetry and will alert the researcher when a sample needs to be collected. Through having this research performed on farm the relevant grower will gain a better understanding of the fate of applied fertilisers, and how to prevent losses. 

The participant will need to be willing to open up his farm for workshops, field day etc and be someone who is open to driving adoption into the wider industry.

Other pre-requisites would include:

• Farms should drain to a nearby waterway/ farm drainage ditch

• Most of the farm should drain water to a single point (where possible) to estimate potential total farm overland losses

• Participant would be open to providing details on fertiliser application rates and timings

Click here for more details on the opportunity, impact and objectives of this important project.

To submit your interest in being involved in this exciting project please contact 

Jeremy Bright

Email:   [email protected]

Mobile:   0427 213 059