Testing SWAN Systems’ SINATA for Orchard Irrigation & Nitrogen Management (AP22003) - PIPS 4 Profit

Part of the PIPS 4 Profit Building Sustainable Soils project (AP22003), the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture is continuing to develop an online platform to forecast and inform apple orchard irrigation and nitrogen decisions in partnership with WA based agtech company, SWAN Systems. Hear more about what is informing this tool, and how orchardists such as SA’s Rob Green are trialling and providing feedback to researchers and developers.

SWAN Systems is a web-based irrigation and nutrients planning, scheduling and management tool that takes advantage of live data collection (irrigation flow and weather) and crop-specific models in each block to provide daily soil moisture analysis and track water usage, drainage and other parameters related to growing any kind of crop in any specified type of soil or irrigation system.

The goals and outcomes of this trial can be summarised as follows:
- Set up fields from farms in different apple-growing regions in SWAN
- Establish and verify the soil moisture prediction models for each of the fields
- Train growers in the use of the software
- Use SWAN to record fertilizer applications and water used per block or variety, and estimate drainage from actual applications (rainfall and/or irrigation)
- Insert actual grower data retrospectively into the SINATA tool to review its predictions (based on average climatic conditions) for the different growers’ fertilizer strategies and yields
- Review which of the SINATA functions SWAN can already perform and what would be needed to incorporate SINATA functionality into SWAN.