New project to boost field crop production in Cambodia and Australia

MURDOCH'S Associate Professor Richard Bell will lead a new three-year $750,000 project funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) to assess land suitability for crop diversification in Cambodia and Australia.

Professor Bell's team will collaborate closely with Dr Seng Vang of the Cambodian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), who completed his PhD at Murdoch in 2000.

The project will assess land suitability for pulse crops in WA as well as Cambodia, with Professor Bell working from Murdoch’s School of Environmental Science in conjunction with Professor Peter White and Noel Schoknecht of the WA Department of Agriculture.

“Cambodia has predominantly a rice based agricultural economy," said Professor Bell who recently returned from a 10-day fact-finding mission there.

He said that since 1987 there had been a number of concerted programs to rebuild the rice economy following the devastating years of civil war.

This had lead to rice self-sufficiency for the past five years with rice yields continuing to increase.

“But Cambodian agriculture is now looking to diversification, particularly in the lowlands, to boost overall productivity," said Professor Bell."This might involve growing field crops in the early wet season or after the harvesting of rice.

"Supplementary irrigation would also be needed since the rainfall in most of Cambodia outside the main rice growing season - from July to November – is low or erratic.

" A research program is also planned by Murdoch University and CARDI to determine the main constraints to field crop production in the uplands.

This would be coupled with an assessment of socio-economic factors to determine which crops were suitable for different soils.

"By contrast with the lowlands of Cambodia that have been cultivated for rice for centuries, the uplands are not extensively used for agriculture," said Professor Bell.

"But as the population grows, there will be pressure to develop the upland areas, as has happened in Thailand and Vietnam in the past two-to-three decades.

"He said the areas most likely to be developed were those where soils were relatively fl at and the land was accessible to roads and markets.

“However, relatively little is known about these landscapes and their soils and their capability for sustainable crop production.

” The project will use innovative modelling approaches to assess land suitability.

“Most work will concentrate on maize, mung bean and soybean, crops for which there is already some local experience in Cambodia, and good market prospects,” said Professor Bell.

“The research team will produce outputs using GIS (Geographical Information Systems) on areas suitable for these crops in the provinces of Kampong Cham, Takeo and Batdambang, taking into account soil, crop and socio-economic factors.

” In WA the project will use similar modelling approaches to determine the most suitable areas and cropping systems for pulse crops in the wheatbelt.

Outputs from the project will help re-establish industry confidence in the pulse industry which is widely regarded as being important for sustainable cropping in Southern Australia.