Australia
October 1, 2025
Delta Agribusiness agronomist Heidi Gooden with grain grower Zach McRae at the paddock-scale trial on his family’s farm near Urangeline, New South Wales.
Photo: Nicole Baxter
Delta Agribusiness Agronomist Heidi Gooden and grower Zach McRae are working together on a new component of the GRDC Southern Farming Systems project in southern NSW. Called Diverse Farms and led by Grassroots Agronomy, it is designed to scale up outcomes from the project’s ongoing small-plot experiments.
Side-by-side faba bean and barley crops on the McRae family’s farm near Urangeline form part of the research and have highlighted the value of crop diversity.
Through Diverse Farms, the McRae family is comparing a 3-year barley/canola/wheat sequence with a 4-year faba bean/canola/wheat/barley sequence. While crop yields from a single year will not be judged in isolation, the 2024 results are positive.
Zach – who farms with his mother, Julie, and brothers Lewis and Joel – says despite 2024’s annual rainfall falling mostly outside the growing season, faba beans yielded, on average, 2.3 t/ha. Adjacent, a barley crop yielded 5.9 t/ha.
As the McRae family’s agronomist, Ms Gooden says the highest-yielding canola in 2024 was grown following a faba bean crop in 2023.
“The water and nutrient legacy of the legume is contributing to the bottom line of the overall rotation,” she says. This message is emerging from the ongoing small-plot experiments and is now being tested in Diverse Farms at the paddock scale.
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