Opposed discs for furrowing in pastoral areas

THROUGHOUT our pastoral regions in all land divisions from Murchison to Kimberley, there are extensive areas of bare country which must be broken in some way to enable water penetration and to provide a place for seed to lodge before regeneration of pasture species can be expected. Earlier articles in this Journal have explained the occurrence of these bare areas, and described methods of furrowing. Checkerboard designs have been successful on perfectly level locations but contouring becomes essential where there is a slope of any dimension

Water usage trials with bananas on the Gascoyne

THE banana industry at Carnarvon is an unusual one by most agricultural standards. Normally a tropical plant liking relatively humid conditions in a high rainfall, the banana is cultivated at Carnarvon in an area of extremely low rainfall and with relatively low humidity throughout the year. Water is pumped to irrigate the crop from the sands of the Gascoyne River bed or from bores adjacent to the river course

Mineral supplements for Kimberley cattle

For some years we have felt that in sections at least of the Kimberley cattle region, stock would benefit from a supplement of phosphorus. In his article More Beef from the Kimberleys, which appeared in 1952 issues of this Journal, Cattle Adviser Grant A. Smith stressed this conviction and referred to trials which would be put in hand using American Fosfeeder equipment to meter the right amounts of soluble phosphate automatically into the trough along with the drinking water

Pastoral research - \u27Munda Field Day demonstrates real progress in the Port Hedland area

When a programme of research was first put in hand at Abydos Research Station in 1951, it was generally thought that an almost impossible task was being undertaken— that of demonstrating that sheep might still be carried profitably on country which had been abandoned after years of occupation as commercial sheep stations

Deferred grazing : what it may mean in the mulga region

THE practice of deferred grazing has been written up in American textbooks and has been applied effectively to sections of the cattle range lands of the United States. Early attempts to apply the principle in eastern Australia were not very successful, and it remained for our Departmental workers in the North-West and Kimberley Divisions to demonstrate the phenomenal results that could be obtained on grasslands in summer rainfall areas

Solving pastoral problems

For many years, most of the Department of Agriculture\u27s rural extension work— especially the application in the field of methods evolved and tested in small-scale experiments—was confined to the southern portion of the State. To be more specific, it was confined to the triangle formed by the south and west coastlines and a line running from a few miles north of Geraldton to the vicinity of Esperance

Kimberley soils need phosphates

Research work carried out at the Kimberley Research Station on the Ord River, and on experimental plots throughout the East and West Kimberleys, indicates that the soils of the Kimberleys are quite as deficient in phosphorus as are the soils of our agricultural areas where superphosphate is essential to the growth of most crops. This may come as a surprise to many people, for there has been a widespread tendency to assume that the Kimberleys soils, especially those of the Ord and Fitzroy valleys, are highly fertile. The black earths of Queensland\u27s Darling Downs produce most enviable yields of sorghum without superphosphate and seem to be able to go on doing it year after year. Perhaps because patches of our Kimberleys are said to resemble these rich basaltic soils of Queensland—perhaps because in a good wet season the growth of grasses is so impressive—or perhaps merely because the Kimberleys are so far away, there seems to have arisen a belief that superphosphate would not be needed to grow crops in those areas. Although we have not yet progressed very far with agricultural research in the Kimberleys, the work done to date points very definitely to a phosphorus deficiency in both plants and animals