Posted on behalf of Prof Derrick Moot The recent rain has done little to top up the soils on dryland farms in the Canterbury region or fill the hydro Lakes. To understand the situation I asked Dr Black to send me the latest soil water data from the RADE. This is a typical soil (Templeton) … Read more
Professor Derrick Moot was awarded the Ray Brougham Trophy by the New Zealand Grassland Trust in Nov 2016. As part of this, award Derrick was required to make a series of public lectures. This video is a recording of the lecture which took place at Lincoln University, Canterbury on 6 Sep 2017. The duration of this … Read more
In these three short videos, taken on 3 August 2016, Derrick talks about the current soil moisture status of a shallow and a deep soil as we prepare for the spring growth season in our dryland systems. In the first clip we see a lucerne stand on a deep Templeton silt loam soil at Lincoln … Read more
In this video Prof Derrick Moot discusses the differences between established and establishing lucerne stands in relation to the rate at which the roots explore and exploit water stored in the soil. Known as the extraction front velocity (EFV) this is a measure in millimeters of soil per day that the plant roots access to … Read more
With drought conditions developing along the east coast we thought maybe we would throw some numbers out to put a price on how lucerne can transform dryland farming systems. Here, at Lincoln, the 2014/15 rainfall for the Jul-Dec period is about 170 mm – or about half what is expected over the same period in … Read more
In this video members of the Lincoln University Dryland Pastures Research team explain the impacts of nitrogen fertility and water availability on the current pasture production of dryland cocksfoot and perennial ryegrass pastures at Ashley Dene (approx. 3 minutes).
Monthly rainfalls have been below average here at Lincoln since April. Pasture growth rates have slowed as water stress conditions have developed and all our dryland experiments at Ashley Dene have been de-stocked earlier than usual. On Monday we released Dick Lucas, our resident annual clover guru, at Ashley Dene to talk about soils, their … Read more