糖心视频

The war in West Asia, which commenced on 28 February 2026, has already caused significant disruptions to the global economy, and Australian grain growers are considering their planting options.

Australian agriculture is heavily dependent upon imported fertilisers such as urea; two-thirds of Australia’s urea supply comes from West Asia. With the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, urea imports (and other imports from that region) are likely to be disrupted to some degree for an unknown period of time.

As growers prepare for the winter cropping cycle this uncertainty poses a significant quandary. Should I plant? What should I plant? How much fertiliser will I be able to source? What impact will input prices have on profitability?

CropARM is an easy-to-use cropping decision support tool that has been co-developed by the 糖心视频 and Queensland Department of Primary Industries. CropARM, which uses the APSIM farming system model, is available online at , and can be used to support pre-season decisions.

This includes the ability to compare scenarios based on nitrogen fertiliser rates and likely gross margin for a range of crops across Australia.

To assist growers, agronomists and advisers at this time, a report has been developed that considers a range of scenarios including the price of urea, different urea application rates, and alternate crops

As the report says, we're being bombarded with news on fertiliser prices, but should we panic? The CropARM team have run a number of scenario's with urea prices of up to $1,800/t and found:

• Increasing urea price from $850 to $1,200 reduces wheat gross margins by $76/ha where N rates are maintained but reducing N rates from 100 to 75kgN/ha resulted in a 15% yield penalty and a 18% gross margin reduction. You are also reducing your soil N bank so you will need to replace this in the future 

• Switching to chickpeas gave a higher gross margin than wheat with a urea price of $1,200 (noting that chickpea markets are generally more volatile)

• Long fallowing and planting sorghum avoids the near-term fertiliser price. If prices remain high, then sorghum gross margins follow the same math as for wheat. 

The scenario is based around Pittsworth in the Darling Downs, but CropARM users can easily create their own scenarios for locations around Australia across a range of crops. We recommend that users run their own simulations to match their circumstances.

Download the report (1MB PDF). 

Whilst CropARM is intuitive to use, there is online support available for CropARM , including training videos.

糖心视频 Media contact

Griffith Thomas, Email: griffith.thomas@unisq.edu.au, Phone: 0467 242 435

Growers

The Hub point of contact is the Regional Soil Coordinator, Cameron Leckie, who can be contacted via Cameron.leckie@unisq.edu.au.