It’s relatively easy to assess the suitability of a new crop for your farm if there is only one crop under consideration. You can pretty well do the figuring on a single piece of paper and decide whether the crop is suitable or not.
But what happens if, like most of us, you can’t narrow the field down to less than three or four opportunities? Can you keep all of the information about each crop’s soil and climate requirements along with the characteristics of your soils and microclimates in your head or recorded clearly on paper?
This was the dilemma facing the Southland, (NZ) Region when they decided to diversify into new crops to improve the resilience of their regional economy. They had invested in the Topoclimate South project and had a magnificent soils and microclimates information resource at a farm scale, but no list of potential crops that could be grown.
The Crops for Southland group engaged a consultant to produce a list of potential crops for the Southland region. He researched the task by climbing over the back fence of a good proportion of the properties in Southland and noting what was growing well in the gardens, paddocks and parks of the region.
This research generated a list of over 250 plants with some sort of potential commercial value. This was a surprising number for a region considered by locals to only have potential for pastoral farming and very limited potential for cropping.
Obviously, this number was far too many to investigate in detail with the limited budget assigned for this project so the project group whittled the list down to fifty potentially profitable crops, where the region had some advantage over other areas for the growing of these crops.
Even fifty different crops was too much to undertake trial work all at once, given the limited resources of the group, so the top ten or twelve crops were selected according to the following criteria:
• Crops with a competitive advantage for the region. There is no point in growing a crop such as grapes if every other region of Australia could grow grapes just as well. The reason for the premiums paid for grape-growing land in the Hunter valley or the Coonawarra region is all about the advantages of soils and microclimates bestowed on these areas.
• It is sensible to only grow those crops for which there are known or potential markets. Unless you have deep pockets, its a major challenge to start a whole new crop industry from scratch.
• Only grow those crops where there is private enterprise or entrepreneur interest. You need to find people with fire in their belly and a passion to develop a new farming industry.
• Only grow those crops that are within society’s resources and not in conflict with an existing activity.
Another way to find new crop options can be undertaken once you have quality data on the climate of your farm. First find a list of other places in the world that have a climate similar to your own. The reason for doing this is that it then gives you some places to start to look for plants that could do well in your environment and that have some economic value.
Some years ago, I undertook the above exercise for the community of Boyup Brook in Western Australia. With some research using climate databases and other facilities which are now available on the internet, I was able to determine that Santiago, General Bernado, Talco and Linares in Chile and Los Gatos had very similar climates to Boyup Brook and was then able to recommend that they started their search for pasture and crop plants suitable for their environment in these places.
