Useful Resources

AGDATA Phoenix provides farm mapping, livestock, grazing, cropping and weather tools.

Agribusiness decision tools is a suite of economic and financial tools to help users make informed business and production decisions. The tools relate to livestock, cropping and horticulture industries in Queensland.

Automatically generated reports bring together information from hundreds of sources in concise and easy to understand reports with maps. The reports enable land managers and investors to better understand agricultural values and climate patterns across Queensland.

ARM tools - a collection of Agricultural Risk Management Tools including: ClimateARM (previously Rainman), FallowARM, CropARM, NitrogenARM and the Deep-P Calculator.

AusFarm is a flexible modelling tool that can help farmers optimise management strategies for livestock, grassland and cropping operations on a mixed farm or across a variable landscape.

AussieGRASS provides:

• historical rainfall maps from 1890.
• pasture growth, biomass and grass fire risk maps from 2000.
• pasture growth outlooks.
• GIS data and various maps – i.e. Rainfall Total, Rainfall Relative, Pasture Growth Total, Pasture Growth Relative, Pasture Growth Seasonal Probability, Total Standing Dry Matter, Potential Flow To Stream Relative, Potential Flow To Stream Seasonal Probability, Pasture Curing, Pasture Grass Fire.

Annual rainfall relative to historical records from 1890, including of the Southern Oscillation Index and Inter-decadal Pacific Oscillation time series.

Regrowing native forests can bring a range of benefits for landscapes and wildlife, especially in heavily cleared areas. Carbon stored by regrowing native forests may be used to secure carbon credits, which may provide financial benefits.

• Regrowth benefits interactive map
• Management guide

A mapping application for viewing biodiversity related information (vegetation, wetlands, wildlife and biodiversity values) and requesting reports and maps relating to properties and user-specified locations.

Rainfall and temperature outlooks, historical patterns and outlook influences

Breedcow and Dynama software helps with herd management and evaluation of beef businesses for beef producers, agribusiness staff, agricultural teachers, consultants, bankers, research and extension officers, and students.

CliMate is a suite of climate analysis tools delivered on the Web, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices. CliMate allows you to interrogate climate records to ask questions relating to rainfall, temperature, radiation, and derived variables such as heat sums, soil water and soil nitrate, and well as El Nino Southern Oscillation status.

Seasonal outlooks, climate variability drivers, soil water content and vegetation condition assessment

Climate Kelpie is for Australian farmers and their advisors. It connects you to tools and information about climate to help you make decisions about your farm business.

The Climate Monitor allows a user to analyse and graph minimum and maximum temperature and rainfall for all available years, calculate thermal time (chill and heat units) and be able to retrieve, analyse and graph temperature thresholds (for a chosen location).

A risk management tool to assist industry, regional groups, business, local government and others to address the uncertainties in the scale and distribution of current and projected climate change.

FarmHub connects Australian farmers with services and support during tough times, such as drought.

A web-based system for requesting information relating to climate and pasture conditions at user-specified locations.

They provides practical and regionally customised EDGEnetwork® grazing land management workshops that help graziers improve their profits in a sustainable way. By understanding the relationships between pasture, water, soils, woodlands, biodiversity, fire and weeds, managers can assess the suitability of different pasture development options and determine the financial impact of a range of grazing management options.

GrassGro helps analyse opportunities and risks that variable weather imposes on the profitability and sustainability of grazing systems.

GrazFeed helps farmers save supplement costs and reach livestock production targets by calculating the daily nutritionalrequirements of sheep and cattle. It is a computer version of the Australian Ruminant Feeding Standards that can be applied to any breed or class of sheep and cattle. GrazFeed can be applied to any temperate or tropical grazing system where sheep or cattle graze pasture, rather than browse shrubs (i.e. not semi-arid rangelands). It can also accommodate management systems which restrict pasture intake, such as strip grazing, cut-and-carry systems and feedlotting. It is regarded as a benchmark in temperate grasslands.

HortCarbon is a web tool designed to calculate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from horticultural operations, using updated Australian National Greenhouse Factors as of August 2023. It primarily calculates emissions from on-farm activities over a one-year period, excluding emissions from the manufacture and transport of inputs, as well as post-harvest transport and marketing.

The IRI probabilistic seasonal climate forecast product is based on a re-calibration of model output from the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s North American Multi-Model Ensemble Project (NMME). International research institute for climate and society

LambAlive External link icon is an easy to use spreadsheet using location; ewe breed; condition score; ewes with twins and weather data to determine mortality risk.

Managing Climate Variability Program (MCV) has been the lead research and development program in Australia for providing climate knowledge to primary producers and natural resource managers. The aim has been to help primary producers and natural resource managers manage the risks, and exploit the opportunities, resulting from Australia’s variable and changing climate.

MLA provides a range of tools and calculators to assist red meat producers in making decisions in their businesses.

MetAccess External link icon enables users to display and analyse weather records collected by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) from official stations around the continent as well as locally collected data or databases from other countries. MetAccess allows the user to summarise and analyse long term climate records and view the results in a graphical or tabular form.

Droughts are inevitable in Australia's rangelands. Yet, despite the physical hardship, the social heartbreak, the animal suffering, the financial and economic consequences, and the environmental damage we know for certain will occur, we appear to be surprised by the next inevitable drought.

Operates at a resolution, and on a geographic scale that allows pastoralists to integrate precision animal data with precision spatial data to match livestock performance to environmental conditions, leading to more efficient pastoral enterprises.

The Queensland Agricultural Land Audit (the Audit) identifies land important to current and future production and the constraints to development, highlighting the diversity and importance of Queensland's agricultural industries across the state. It is a key reference tool that will help guide investment in the agricultural sector and inform decision making to ensure the best use of our agricultural land in the future.

Reports back to 1995, include a climate summary and outlook, drought declarations and information related to livestock and pasture.

Rainman is a climate data analysis tool that helps users improve their management of climate risks. The tool enables users to analyse rainfall and other climate variables at individual locations, taking into account seasonal patterns and forecasts.

Global sea surface temperature anomaly maps from 1982.

Australia-wide patched point and gridded climate datasets from 1889, used for research and modelling.

Seasonal rainfall probabilities based on the ‘phases’ of the Southern Oscillation Index.

SoilWaterApp provides farmers and advisers with a ready estimate of plant available water (PAW) in the soil during a fallow and early crop phase.

A simple index used for monitoring the ENSO. Daily SOI values are available from 1991 and monthly averages are available from 1886.

Monitors Pacific Ocean sea surface temperatures (SSTs) from March to October each year to provide long-lead ‘outlooks’ for Queensland summer (November to March) rainfall.

Stocktake is a paddock-scale land condition monitoring and management package. It has been developed to provide grazing land managers with a practical, systematic way to: assess land condition and long-term carrying capacity, and calculate short-term forage budgets.

USQ has produced a booklet as a valuable decision support tool for the agriculture and grazing industry. It explains El Niño and the Southern Oscillation, describes what causes Queensland's weather and shows how the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) can be used to assess chances of getting rain, crop yields and grass growth and animal production.

WhopperCropper provides agronomists and farmers with the capability to use crop modelling and climate forecasting to better manage cropping risks. It packages pre-run crop modelling and climate forecasting scenarios (600,000 APSIM simulations) into databases relevant to individual farming districts. It quantifies the effects of crop input levels, rainfall, SOI phase effects on potential yields and gross margins.