Regenerative Cropping Practice Guides

Multispecies cropping involves the use of multiple crop species from diverse plant families at the same time. The practice is often used to bring diversity into farming systems, transition ‘problem’ paddocks and build farm resilience.

Reducing herbicides in cropping systems tends to involve multiple complementary strategies, particularly strategies for weed management. This guide covers efficiency, substitution, redesign strategies.

Foliar applications of nutrients and/or biostimulants to crop foliage with the aim of improving plant health, overcoming soil constraints and improving overall resilience.

Biological inputs and fertilisers are microbially active sources of crop nutrition and biostimulants that support crop growth. These inputs are often used to reduce reliance on synthetic inputs, and to improve soil biological health and organic matter.

Nitrogen is an important nutrient for crop growth. This guide explains how nitrogen moves around soils and plants, and how to make the most of the nitrogen applied and improve nitrogen cycling in a cropping system.

Intercropping involves growing two or more complementary crops together to increase plant diversity, with flow-on benefits for crop health, productivity, farm resilience, and soil and ecological health.

Integrating livestock involves combining cropping with sheep, cattle or other animals. Integrating livestock addresses one of the biggest challenges to soil and landscape regeneration in cropping systems by reintroducing species diversity, and can lead to immediate improvements in nutrient cycling and weed and biomass management. This guide introduces methods farmers are using to integrate livestock into broadacre cropping and the benefits of doing so.

Famers Myles and Julie Ballentine share simple soil and plant testing and monitoring methods that they implement on their farm near Banana QLD. They also share the benefits of soil and plant monitoring for them, and how the insights from monitoring help with their descision making.