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Projects and partnerships with sugarcane growers
NQ Dry Tropics’ Sugar Program helps Burdekin cane growers adopt best practices to boost profits, improve farm sustainability and contribute to the health of the Great Barrier Reef.
Our Sugar Team helps growers to:
This represents a win for the grower through improved productivity and a win for the environment protecting water quality flowing into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon.
Cane growing in the Lower Burdekin
The Lower Burdekin spans the floodplains of the Haughton and Burdekin rivers, with most cane grown in the Haughton Basin. Cane is also grown south of the Burdekin River around Home Hill, Millaroo, and Dalbeg.
Through science-backed projects, growers have been able to dramatically reduce the amount of nitrogen applied to their crop in fertiliser.
Reef Trust Tender projects showed conclusively growers could reduce expensive nitrogen fertiliser use by significant amounts — in some cases, more than 20 per cent — without reducing yield.
Automating and optimising irrigation can also reduce water and energy costs and eliminating farm run-off.
Key facts about the Lower Burdekin
We partner with industry groups to help growers adopt sustainable farming practices that cut dissolved inorganic nitrogen and pesticide runoff to the Great Barrier Reef.
This includes:
For more than two decades, NQ Dry Tropics has been helping Lower Burdekin cane growers innovate and improve their productivity and sustainability.
Those innovations have also helped growers achieve marked reductions in runoff containing nutrients and pesticides into local waterways that lead to the Great Barrier Reef lagoon.
As scientific knowledge and pragmatic on-farm experience meet, the past five years, in particular has been a time of significant advancement.
Since 2020, NQ Dry Tropics has led projects that offered grants for growers to improve irrigation infrastructure enabling them to avoid water waste and nutrient-laden runoff.
There have been at least nine trials involving mixed species cover crops aimed at increasing soil health and boosting nitrogen levels in fallow blocks meaning the crop needed less nitrogen delivered in chemical fertilisers.
More than 10,499ha was electromagnetically mapped allowing delivery partners to produce 40 Prescription Amelioration (PA) maps.
Contractors used the PA maps to spread ameliorants like gypsum, lime and mill mud applying the right amount in the right areas to improve the condition of the soil, meaning less nutrient would be needed to grow the crop.
Automated irrigation has allowed growers to precisely control the amount of water, the flow rate and frequency at which it is delivered to the cane.
NQ Dry Tropics’ delivery partners have directly installed more than 20 irrigation systems on Lower Burdekin farms.
We have been involved in developing more than 40 automated irrigation plans and 40 irrigation management plans to support the genesis of automation.
GPS units, flow rate controllers and Stool Zippas are tools made available through NQ Dry Tropics projects aimed at supporting and refining the innovative changes farmers have adopted.
Since 2020, 125 detailed irrigation infrastructure maps have been produced and 285 GPS systems have been tweaked to enable growers to fully implement the automated features available.
This has meant unprecedented accuracy in the paddocks, reducing wastage and possible runoff.
Our Reef Trust Tenders project proved to be very successful.
It supported 50 growers across six years to dramatically reduce the amount of fertiliser applied to their crop… and they didn’t lose yield.
Decreasing the amount of nitrogen (N) meant a marked saving in their fertiliser bill. Coupled with no decrease in yield, the considerable savings on fertiliser meant their profitability increased.
It meant growers could be more profitable and the Great Barrier Reef was less likely to be impacted by excess nitrogen being lost in local waterways.
Growers were able to achieve higher profits using less N by using science to more accurately match fertiliser application rates with the requirements of the crop each year.
The word spread and minimising the application of N to the crop is now an almost universal practice.
It was a community culture shift that proved pivotal.
The Reef Trust Tenders project was delivered by NQ Dry Tropics and funded by the partnership between the Australian Government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.
