Western Australian grain growers collect valuable information through soil testing, machinery, farm management platforms, spreadsheets and paddock records. However, this data is often held across separate systems and in different formats, making it difficult to bring together when making significant farm investment decisions.
In parallel, research organisations have developed decision-support calculator tools that while they contain complex methodology often require manual data entry and generate single, whole farm level outputs.
The WA Farm Data Sharing Project explored how growers could securely reuse their existing farm data, share it with a relevant research organisation and in return receive useful, farm-specific decision support.
Soil ameliorating lime application decision making was selected as the first use case because soil acidity is a significant and costly constraint for Western Australian grain businesses, and WA’s DPIRD has an advanced, but single use, liming calculator in iLime.
At the centre of the project was the Lime Enterprise Analysis Pipeline, known as LEAP.
LEAP extended DPIRD’s existing iLime and Optlime modelling from a largely manual, single-paddock process into a whole-farm optimisation framework.
The framework can process multiple paddocks, soil sampling locations, crop rotations, yield and price assumptions and liming strategies over a 20-year period. Monte Carlo simulations are used generate a broad range of possible outcomes rather than one fixed prediction, with associated likelihood.
August 2026: Final Report: WA Farm Data Sharing
February 2023: FACRC Research Symposium: A/Prof Julia Easton, Curtin University
October 2021: FACRC Research Symposium: A/Prof Adam Sparks, DPIRD WA
July 2021 - Grower Group Alliance: Project Updates
