Development and extension to realise the system benefits and economic potential of mungbean in northern farming systems

Grower Feedback has indicated that there are still limitations to achieving reliable mungbean production. While wheat is the main pillar crop, growers understand that a monoculture creates weed and disease issues and therefore requires rotation crops to be available. Mungbeans provide a profitable short season alternative summer legume across the Northern region.

GRDC farming systems trials have confirmed that systems with legumes, particularly mungbean, achieve similar potential profits to other systems in the poorer runs of seasons, but offer significant upside under more favourable conditions. With current mungbean varieties offering greater reliability and yield potential, and global demand maintaining high prices (5-year average $1200/t), further development and extension effort is required to expand the planted area of mungbean and increase mungbean yield to deliver improve profitability and systems benefits to Northern growers.

This proposed investment is focused on providing growers the agronomic parameters for stabilising mungbean yield by environment and meeting the yield potential. The investment is looking to apply previous research to provide growers a series of regional 'On-Farm' trials to increase confidence for all production areas.

The investment will validate and extend the Genetic*Environment*Management understanding from recent GRDC projects and their consequent recommendations for mungbean management. This is a development and extension project using a participatory approach with growers and agronomists that will deliver ‘peer to peer’ on-farm validation of practices. Combining the results of previous projects and systems modelling will provide prospective mungbean growers the relevant yield gap benchmarks of potential and attainable yields against actual achieved performance.

The proposed methodology will provide on-farm trials with well supported agronomic data collection to support discussions on decision making. Growers will be engaged by having a local site to compare along with updated information. Using both traditional field days and social media, growers and agronomists can readily engage in updates on progress and discussions. The more detailed agronomic measurements allow a discussion between modelled forecast and actuals based on seasonal condition. Analytics support, including for field trial experimental design and analysis, is available as an in-kind GRDC contribution to this investment through GRDC’s strategic partnership Analytics for the Australian Grains Industry (AAGI). To access AAGI support, applicants must negotiate with AAGI directly and describe the agreed scope of support in their tender. Please make enquiries to the University of Queensland (attention Prof. Scott Chapman) at [email hidden]. Please note, applicants that decline AAGI support must provide a technical and value-for-money rationale for not using in-kind AAGI support.

The final report of the project will be a public facing document and information from the trials will be used to update mungbean manual BMP. This allows growers to compare recommended best management to real life conditions in their local region.