Almond Centre of Excellence

This project provides for the ongoing operations, maintenance and expansion of the Almond Centre of Excellence (ACE). The ACE is a 60-hectare experimentation and demonstration orchard that is the home of the almond industry’s R&D activities. Located in Loxton, South Australia, the Centre is a collaboration between industry, researchers and commercial suppliers that showcases best production practices and technologies and pushes the boundaries in search of significant developments in production systems. The overall aim of the project is to bring world’s best practice to the Australian almond industry. This will be achieved by providing the infrastructure and equipment to facilitate orchard-based trials and provide a demonstration site for the knowledge and technologies sourced from the Hort Innovation R&D program, overseas researchers, commercial suppliers and grower innovation. In doing so, the industry has moved towards the widespread adoption of production practices that will enable it to successfully compete against the US industry.

This investment is assessing the reliability, accuracy and cost-effectiveness of driverless tractor technology across a number of almond orchards in Australia, including the levy-funded Almond Centre of Excellence experimental and demonstration orchard. This research will provide horticultural growers with the information they need to make investment decisions in the future on orchard technology such as driverless tractors. The project team will assess the day-to-day performance of the driverless tractor over an extended period to measure its consistency and reliability under a range of duties and orchard conditions. Almond orchard practices are common to many crops, so demonstration days will also be held for other industries such as olive, citrus and table grape.

This investment evaluates a range of potential new almond rootstocks and assesses their compatibility with the common almond cultivars grown in Australia and their performance under Australia's growing conditions. Improved understanding and knowledge of the performance of prunus rootstocks will drive grower profitability by informing decision-making processes. It will also reduce the risk of adopting new rootstock varieties by making rootstock performance data available under Australian government environments. This project builds on previous evaluation trials established at Lindsay Point and Loxton in South Australia under the Hort Innovation Almond Fund projects AL11012 and AL16006. This project continues the data collection and evaluation for the first two trial sites and establishes a third trial site in the Riverina, where soils are much heavier. The research team will measure key growth and production parameters for comparison against industry-standard Nemaguard.

This investment runs a targeted breeding program to develop new almond varieties with improved production characteristics, while progressing the evaluation of varieties from earlier iterations of the program and from overseas breeding programs. The aim is to provide industry access to new varieties that are high-yielding, with self-fertility, improved disease tolerance, closed shells and desirable visual and eating qualities.

This investment explores cover cropping as a management practice in Australian almond orchards by assessing its efficacy and practicality in specific almond-growing regions for more effective and sustainable orchard management. The project team are establishing field trials in two almond-growing regions, with up to six under-tree management options that seek to increase soil cover, including a business-as-usual herbicide bare-earth control. The research will seek to understand how cover crops influence every aspect of the production system and which crops are best to mitigate soil damage, minimise water use and avoid the need for herbicide addition.

This project is building confidence in the almond industry by improving the efficiency of production through transitioning to higher density orchard systems. The South Australian Research and Development Institute proposes to meet this objective by continuing the long-term monitoring of production and metrics that identify resource-use efficiency. This research has been facilitated through the recently established experimental orchards at the Almond Centre of Excellence.

The National tree crop intensification program (AS18000) is a multi-agency, multi-discipline five-year collaborative R&D program of tree crop-specific projects established to deliver step-change orchard system intensification knowledge, understanding and technical advancements to the almond, avocado, citrus, macadamia and mango industries.