Redesign of plant production systems for Australian landscapes. Solutions for a better environment

While rural production has played a major role in Australia’s economic development, it has had a profoundly detrimental impact on the quality of land and water resources. Australia’s geological history has created a unique, ancient, very flat continent that has accumulated enormous amounts of salts in the soils, regolith, lakes and groundwater. Most of our rivers and groundwater systems are sluggish, with only a small capacity to move salt from the continent. Thus, our farming systems must be able to work in a landscape that is old, flat, salty and driven by a dry, highly variable climate. Unfortunately, most of our European style of agriculture, pastures and annual crops is ill suited to this landscape. The resulting land and water damage is well documented. Much of the degradation is the consequence of agro-ecosystems that leak carbon, water and nutrients. This poses a major challenge for agronomy and soil science: to find plant production systems that can capture this waste and turn it into wealth creating products and ecosystem services as part of the development of a new rural landscape. To achieve this goal, soil science and agronomy will need to lift its gaze beyond the crop plot, soil profile pit to the dynamics of soil and plant community processes at the scale of catchments and landscapes. Background and matters of principl