LOW rainfall zone croppers across Australia went into uncharted territory last year, with many smashing yield records.
In the Mallee farmers harvested crops that comfortably beat previous records, while in the upper Eyre Peninsula there were reports of lentil crops yielding the district average for wheat, which normally yields around double the pulse.
While it was a year for the ages, a leading nutrition expert has warned that the big yields will not come without a cost.
"When you're taking off big crops, you're taking out a lot of crop nutrient and that will need to be replaced," said Rob Norton, Norton Agronomic.
Speaking at the Birchip Cropping Group trial review day last Friday Associate Professor Norton said farmers would need to have an idea of their nutrition requirements for the year ahead and may have to factor in some big fertiliser budgets.
"For a five tonne to the hectare wheat crop you're taking out 100kg/ha of nitrogen, 15kg/ha of phosphorus and 18kg/ha of potassium," he said.
He urged farmers to conduct as many soil tests as they could to get an accurate idea of what was out there in the paddock.
"They are far from perfect but soil tests are the best worst tool a farmer can have."
"You have to do a lot of tests to get anything resembling an accurate picture but any information you can get that can help with planning for a crop's nutrition needs is helpful."
Ass Prof Norton said he thought the primary focus this year would be ensuring there was not a nitrogen deficit.
"If I had to identify a priority it would be nitrogen, P levels will have come back last year due to the big yields but would not be as pronounced, but as well as the crops there will be nitrogen leaching and in some cases where it got wet denitrifying."
Not only farmers that had big yields will have to monitor N levels.
"We did trials in southern NSW where waterlogging was an issue and the amount of denitrification was just staggering, we had examples where a paddock lost 87kg/ha in just a month."
"The problem was particularly pronounced when it was warmer, when the paddocks were wet but it was still cold it was not as big a problem."
He encouraged farmers to run nitrogen test strips in their paddocks to see how effective their fertiliser program was.
"Just turn the spreader off for a run and then you'll get the visual as to the difference the nitrogen makes."
Ass Prof Norton said it would be a balancing act between working through other potential issues such as heavy stubble loads and disease management and maintaining as much soil fertility as possible.
Burning has been raised as a possible tool in getting stubble loads down in order to minimise issues at sowing time and a means of lowering the amount of disease inoculum present, but Ass Prof Norton said it was a negative for crop nutrition.
"Burning will lead to a markedly higher rate of nitrogen leaching so that is something to factor in if you're thinking of going down that path."
He said farmers could use other methods than synthetic fertilisers to build nitrogen levels, such as planting a legume phase, but cautioned it would not be a silver bullet.
"Faba beans can be good, lentils can fix nitrogen but they also take it out in the grain so you're probably still in deficit most of the time, the key is to try and understand how much N you're fixing with the pulse crop, a general rule of thumb is about 20-30kg/ha of N per tonne a hectare of biomass."