Dookie is the hub site of the Long Term Trial, it is hosted by the University of Melbourne at the Dookie Campus in North East Victoria.
The central field experiment in Dookie incorporates three farming systems and a native grassland as treatments. The farming systems are (1) intensive cropping (wheat – canola rotation), (2) mixed farming with an annual pasture and a trade lamb enterprise (rotation of dual purpose wheat, dual purpose canola and an annual legume pasture) and (3) mixed farming with ley pastures and a self-replacing flock of sheep (rotations of dual purpose wheat, dual purpose canola and two years of clover pastures, supplemented by permanent pastures of lucerne and digit grass). Treatments are implemented as fully phased sets of plots per system (“mini-farms”) replicated three times. The 0.34 ha plots are sufficiently large to allow sheep grazing in a realistic setting.
Measurements include crop yields and quality, animal performance, and environmental variables such as soil properties and greenhouse gas budgets to assess productivity, profitability and sustainability of the systems.
Michael Tausz (Professor, Drought Resilience)
Project lead and coordination
James Hunt (Professor, Agronomy)
Project lead crop and pasture agronomy
Dr Danica Parnell (Research Fellow, Farming Systems)
Animal and pasture science
Dr Shahnaj Parvin (Research Fellow, Farming Systems)
Crop and plant science
