Kansas and Australia may be separated by thousands of miles, but wheat producers in both regions face a familiar problem: producing a profitable crop when water is limited and weather refuses to cooperate. In this episode of Wheat’s On Your Mind, K-State wheat and forage Extension specialist Romulo Lollato Ph.D. and Australian farming systems agronomist John Kirkegaard Ph.D. compare the two production systems and discuss what each can learn from the other. Kirkegaard is spending several months at Kansas State University as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Agriculture and Life Sciences after Lollato completed an extended research visit to Australia.
One of the biggest lessons from Australia is that improving wheat production often requires looking beyond the wheat crop itself. Australian growers and researchers have investigated soil constraints, rotations, summer fallow, weed control, planting dates, fertility and other pieces of the cropping system together. Kirkegaard describes a major water-use efficiency initiative that challenged grower groups to improve system water-use efficiency by 10% over five years. Better soil and rotation management combined with strict summer weed control helped some growers carry roughly 2 additional inches of stored moisture into the growing season. The work illustrates what Kirkegaard calls “incremental transformation”: individual management improvements may appear modest, but their combined effect can fundamentally change crop performance.
Those lessons are now helping inspire new research in Kansas. Lollato discusses plans for a Profitable Wheat Frontier Network that would bring researchers directly into producers’ fields and use commercial equipment, soil and plant samples, yield maps and precision agriculture technologies to investigate ways to increase both yield and profit. Instead of assuming that greater yield requires simply adding more inputs, researchers want to determine which investments actually contribute to productivity and where costs can be reduced without sacrificing yield. After a 2026 Kansas wheat season marked by drought, freeze, hail, flooding and extraordinary temperature swings, the collaboration also opens new opportunities to understand how wheat systems can better withstand weather extremes.
