Irrigated Cropping Council records its biggest year of trials at Kerang

The organisation has been running since 2002 and this year had its most trials ever.

Executive officer Charlotte Aves said the council had partnered with several organisations and had recently started a trial with Murray Dairy under its Fodder for the Future program.

"That's a new collaboration for us," Dr Aves said.

"What they wanted to do was build collaboration with grain growers and improve the knowledge of dairy farmers of how they grow some of these annual crops."

Dr Aves said cross industry learning was becoming more prevalent.

The research station also has variety trials that have been running for decades under different management, along with the Optimising Irrigated Grains second winter sowing, the Smarter Irrigation for Profit final year, and a winter canola demonstration supported by PacSeeds.

There was also a collaboration with the University of Western Australia and the Grains Research and Development Corporation to measure heat stress in canola.

Trials manager Damian Jones said some of the noteworthy results of recent trials included the role pre-irrigation could play.

Although spring remained the preferred time to irrigate, it would only be successful if there were crops growing in the first place, he said.

Another key learning was the limit crops had on uptake of nitrogen applied artificially.

"We can't grow big yields by throwing more urea at it - it has to come from the inherent fertility of the site," he said.

Mr Jones said the trials themselves had changed over time to have more of a focus on the best time to use water.

"A lot of our work out here has previously been about maximising productivity - tip as much water, tip as much fertiliser on as possible to drive yields and see what we can really do with these things," he said.

"But economically that's not always a good decision, the highest yield isn't necessarily the most economic or profitable."

One of the challenges was trying to predict winter rainfall, he said, as the irrigation season closed in May and reopened in August.

"We've looked at various trials over the years and he we had this rule of thumb that if water was more than $100 you probably shouldn't be pre-irrigating, but then you get caught out in years when it doesn't rain during winter," he said.

"That's one of the key problems - we've sort of got maybe the agronomics down and how we can grow these things and what varieties, but it's what do you grow to suit the water price or the water availability.

"At $100 everyone's reasonably confident they can make some money of things, but when water hits $250, $375, $500 it starts to make it a different game.

"It's no longer about just maximising yield... it's about maximising your profitability."

Growers were also increasingly looking for flexibility within their cropping operation, Dr Aves said.