Topdressed Lime Demonstration Sites

The Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) funded Producer Demonstration Site (PDS) project – ‘Managing soil acidity in permanent pastures’ is investigating top-dressed liming strategies in non-arable pasture systems where lime incorporation is not possible or preferred.  The project involves three lime demonstration sites. One site at Mannus and another site at Holbrook were established by HLN and NSW DPI in February 2021 with funding from the ‘Tackling Soil Acidity’ project. The third site located at Rosewood, consists of multiple lime strips applied by the farmer since 2017. The MLA PDS funding, secured in March 2022, will enable these three sites to continue with money going towards annual soil testing, pasture measurements and field days. 

The sites at Holbrook and Mannus are different to our lime sites at Burrumbuttock and Morven that are currently in a cropping phase and testing different lime rates, with and without incorporation. The Holbrook and Mannus sites include 4 treatments with 4 replications that were decided by the project steering committee made up of local producers, advisors, and the project research team (Table 1).

Read Year 2 results here

Read Year 1 results here

Read Rosewood Case Study here

Table 1. Mannus and Holbrook demonstration site treatments and descriptions

Table 2. Rosewood case study site lime strip descriptions