Machinery
South Australians have made important contributions to Australia’s farm machinery innovations. In 1843 J.W. Ridley developed the grain stripper paving the way for successful export-orientated wheat farming by the 1850s.

But the most decisive South Australian farming invention was the stump-jump plough developed in 1876 by Robert B. Smith. Rather than deeply cultivate like the nineteenth century farming pioneers were doing, the “stump-jump” had a weighted hinge which lead to the more sustainable system of shallow cultivation, minimising damage to the already fragile soils of the continent. Later improved with a strong clock-spring mechanism the “stump-jump” principle is now widely used on farm machinery throughout Australia and western USA.

Fertilisers
By the early twentieth century most South Australian farmers were using a wheat-fallow farming system with few livestock. Basically, after a year of fallow with frequent cultivation to suppress weeds and wrongly thought to conserve moisture, wheat was sown with superphosphate following the first rains of autumn.

Initially the system worked fine, but by the 1930s deteriorated soil structure and depleted fertility, despite huge quantities of super being used led to wind and water erosion.

A solution had to be found.

Numerous Departmental researchers, along with others in the local and national scientific community, have tackled the development and use of superphosphates for improving agriculture since J.D. Custance, the Professor of Agriculture appointed in 1882, first identified the importance of phosphate fertilisers on wheat. Yields of wheat that had been falling by that time, but the trend was reversed after 1890 when the Correll Brothers at Minlaton demonstrated Custance’s views by sowing seed with phosphate fertilisers. The successful development of modern agricultural industries in most of South Australia could not have been achieved without the discovery and correction of trace element deficiencies in crops, pastures, horticultural tree and vegetable crops, plantation forests and livestock.

Trace Element disorders in South Australian Agriculture (PDF 107kb) Prepared by Doug Reuter (July 2007) with valuable contributions from Geoff Judson, Robin Graham, Ben Robinson, Nigel Wilhelm, Bob Hannam and Jock McFarlane.

Pastures
A solution to the farming dilemma was found, notably the introduction of legumes into the cycle. Subterranean clover and various other species of medics were introduced from the Mediterranean possibly as early as the 1870s. Farmers began growing pastures on land not immediately ploughed up after the grain harvest.

Subterranean clover and the medics formed the basis for a ley farming system in which the grains and pastures alternated, one of the most important Australian agricultural innovations of the twentieth century.

‘The Early Production by A.W. Howard of Subterranean Clover Seed’, D.E. Symon (http://www.sardi.sa.gov.au/pages/organisation/links/early_prod.htm)

A.F. Tideman, The medic fields: A story of South Australian agriculturalists working in West Asia and the Mediterranean area

Overseas projects
Material on the Department of Agriculture’s work in Algeria, Jordan, Libya and Iraq, the International Dryland Farming conferences and the creation and role of Sagric International is contained in numerous interviews in the Transcripts Section of this website. See also A.F. Tideman, The medic fields: A story of South Australian agriculturalists working in West Asia and the Mediterranean area, SAGRIC International, Adelaide, 1994.

The following article on South Australian and Western Australian involvement in Iraq was prepared by Dr John Radcliffe. It was prepared for Crawford Fund support for the travel of a number of Iraqi scientists to Australia to attend a National Agronomy Conference and study crop production in Australia.
Australia and Iraq agriculture (PDF 118kb)

Algeria, reference in Jim McColl interview
Jordan, reference in Peter Barrow interview
International Dryland Farming Conference, reference in Trevor Dillon interview  
Sagric International
Libya

Advances in technology
J.W. Reddin, The first stripper: settling an historical argument
N.J. Croser, ‘A New Machine for a New Society: The stripper in South Australia, 1843–1900’