Tall Wheat Grass - A Cropping Solution to Salinity | DPIRD

Tall Wheat Grass – a cropping solution to salinity

“John Harding and his family farm east of Ongerup and operate a total cropping system over 6,650 hectares. The Harding’s use of the perennial pasture species tall wheat grass is an innovative strategy to lift the productivity of the saline sodic heavy grey clay crabhole country that makes up some 14 % of his 2200-hectare home property Hazelwood. Here they are developing a ‘phase’ farming system that transitions areas of pure swards of the tall wheat grass in a regenerative process to improve the soils productivity sufficiently to then go into a continuous crop ‘phase.’
John takes a proactive approach that utilises a road scrapper machine, at around $500 per hectare, to level the crabholes and then sows the perennial pasture using his controlled traffic-seeding program. Whilst he has no livestock to graze the tall wheat grass, his prime objective is to regenerate the soil structure and reduce soil salinity in the root zone over these parts of his farm.
He has discovered that following several years of the pasture phase these crabhole areas have improved sufficiently to return to growing productive barley crops.
In addition, during the pasture phase the tall wheat grass areas are managed using regular slashing and fertilising to promote palatable leaf and stem for hay production. The hay, of stock maintenance quality, is in demand and sold off-farm. The slashing has the benefit of encouraging the grass to produce more tillers, which in turn produce a bulk of quality seed harvested following summer rain and sold as a cash crop or used for seeding of other areas on-farm. John has been able to harvest the seed at between 100 - 400 kg per hectare and sold or no less than $10 per kg. As such it is a profitable activity and the input costs of levelling the crabholes are recovered from the tall wheat grass seed sales alone.
Over the years, areas have also been revegetated using native trees. John has had great success when establishing the trees by seeding tall wheat grass under the trees. This has provided a good understorey that in combination utilizes groundwater on land that was going saline and provides a more aesthetically pleasing look to John’s property.”

Read more at:
https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/soil-sali...

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