Down On The Virtual Farm With GrassGro 3

FARM NEWS

Lead project officer for the GrassGro project, CSIRO Plant Industry's Libby Salmon.

by Staff Writers
Canberra, Australia (SPX) Jun 18, 2007
Graziers will have improved access to decades of CSIRO grazing research with the release of GrassGro 3, the latest version of the high-powered grazing management software. Launched at the Grasslands Society of Southern Australia's annual conference today by Tim Prance, Senior Consultant in Pastures and Grazing Systems with Rural Solutions South Australia, GrassGro version 3 includes a new flexible user interface and a range of additional powerful features, including tools to help graziers manage climate change impacts.

"Farming decisions are becoming increasingly complex, with climate variability, drought and varying commodity prices," Mr Prance says. "Tools such as GrassGro give farmers the chance to explore innovative options and assess possible risks to their businesses."

GrassGro lead project officer Libby Salmon says the program is based on over 20 years of CSIRO field experimentation from across Australia.

"GrassGro uses research results, daily weather data and inputs from the actual paddock to model a virtual grazing system," Ms Salmon says. "Users can apply different management options and compare the predicted outcomes in an easily-generated report.

"While it is an extremely powerful tool on the farm, the real strength of GrassGro is its flexibility," she says. "The program can be used to improve management decisions in a range of environments, including catchment areas and native grasslands, and its modelling capabilities can be used to assess drought, dryland salinity, greenhouse gas emissions and grassland fire risk."

GrassGro's ability to help analyse the opportunities and risks that variable weather imposes on the profitability and sustainability of grazing systems, such as drought management, will be used in future research projects to assess other long-term impacts of weather variability such as climate change.

The latest version features:
+ easily-tailored descriptions of sheep or beef enterprises
+ unique capacity to test management options as a season develops
+ pre-designed issues for analysis
+ automatic reporting
+ access to constantly updated daily weather data
+ evaluation of possible longer-term shifts in weather patterns.

GrassGro is one of the GrazPlan suite of decision support tools developed by CSIRO to address important issues in agriculture and land management. GrassGro is available through Horizon Agriculture Pty Limited;

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FARM NEWS

Annan Leads Drive To Reverse African Farming Decline

Cape Town (AFP) June 14, 2007
Former UN chief Kofi Annan was tasked with leading a 150 million dollar drive Thursday to reverse the decline in Africa's farming sector, earmarking it as key to lifting the continent out of poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa's food production had been dropping year-on-year for more than a decade as a third of the continent's population, or some 200 million people, suffer from hunger, he said at the World Economic Forum on Africa.

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