A couple of months ago, we shared an update on a newly completed levy-funded project that investigated ways to increase yields or reduce input costs for processing vegetable crops in Australia.

At the time, the project team from the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA) developed a series of fact sheets summarising their research and providing recommendations for practical on-farm actions that can help growers of broccoli, carrots, green beans, cauliflower and sweet corn improve their production practices.

The team’s now filed the final report covering the entire project, which builds on these fact sheets and provides an in-depth review of their research methodology and all its findings.

As part of its research funded by Hort Innovation, the TIA team looked at what leading processing vegetable growers are doing to see how they’ve made their way to the head of the pack.

This included conducting interviews with Simplot growers who have already met or exceeded the company’s yield targets for 2020, as well as a research review of best practice and recent innovations for the project’s target crops.

The final report includes summaries of these grower interviews, from discussions of their fertiliser usage and harvest timing to the impact of their row width on disease incidence and overall yield.

If you’re interesting in learning all the details about this valuable project and all its findings, you can find this final report on the InfoVeg database.

This post appeared in the AUSVEG Weekly Update published 23 October 2018. Subscribe to the Update using our online form to receive the latest industry news in your inbox every week!