Hawkesbury Institute Seminar

Please join us with Professor Hans Lambers from the University of Western Australia as he presents the next HIE seminar.

Australian soils are generally low in nutrients especially phosphorus. For many years superphosphate was routinely applied to agricultural soils to improve the levels of available phosphorus but even then deficiencies can result if other soil conditions like low pH occur and phosphorus becomes bound to metals like manganese or aluminium. In fact at low pH, plants can suffer from both phosphorus deficiency and aluminium toxicity which sometimes have similar symptoms.

The question that arises is why Australian native plants seem to be so good at using and accessing available phosphorus even when it is present in only tiny amounts. It raises the question of how they can achieve this without becoming deficient, what mechanisms they adopt to access phosphorus reliably and whether we can somehow modify our cropping systems to use some of the mechanisms to better access P, especially in conditions where P is adequately present but has otherwise become unavailable.