Open Day 2016

Ladies theme

A huge hit last year, the Ladies Agronomy Tour, is a program of selected presentations from across all the Themes – WHEAT, CANOLA, SOILS, LIVESTOCK and DRONES. A cross section of presentations has been selected and great speakers to ensure that there is something relevant to every farming situation.

The tour will be guided by one of our committed FarmLink members with passion and knowledge of agricultural R&D and the sessions will provide participants with plenty of opportunity to ask any of those questions you have been saving up.

The tour is hands on from the start with a discussion about Brucellosis in rams. Brucellosis seriously impacts ram fertility and spreads easily. The good news is that prevention is as simple as checking rams prior to purchase. Riverina Local Land Services vets, Rahul Shankar and Liz Braddon, will be on hand to demonstrate the process and talk about general strategies to protect your farm biosecurity. Brendan Nolan from Shearwell will also demonstrate the use of electronic ear tags and auto weighers to simplify the capture and storage of critical data about your sheep flock.

The tour then heads up the paddock to link with three of our industry experts in canola disease management – Laura Maher, canola breeder with Cargill, Angus MacLennan, technical advisor with Bayer and Kurt Lindbeck, plant pathologist with NSWDPI. Between these three you will hear about chemical, genetic and agronomic strategies to reduce the incidence and impact of two important canola diseases, Black Leg and Sclerotinia.
After lunch the tour resumes in the trial paddock with Kirrily and Greg Condon looking at weed management strategies to reduce resistance and Andrew Lockley talking about the impact of sowing time on variety performance.

The tour then moves to the soils theme and will hear from Mark Glover discussing how to assess your soil water holding capacity and plant available water. The group will then finish with some technology with Andrew Whitlock talking about assessing and addressing variation across paddocks and Nic Wilke demonstrating the safe and practical use of drones in agriculture.