GRDC Weed Management Initiative

Project code: UOA2501-004RTX

Project Manager: Kate Morris, Project Officer, MFMG

Project duration: April 2025 - June 2030

 

About the project

The GRDC Weed Management Initiative is a $47 million investment led by GRDC and developed to support Australian grain growers to manage one of the most persistent and costly challenges facing farming businesses.

WMI aims to provide sustainable and effective weed management strategies through four nodes across Australia, ensuring both national collaboration and regional specificity.

The 5.5-year initiative will bring Australia’s leading researchers and communications and extension specialists together to work on innovative, cutting-edge weed management research, development and extension (RD&E).

Five programs will be delivered through the WMI that span the continuum of herbicide resistance from evolutionary dynamics to on the ground mitigation strategies, communications and extension along with capacity building and succession planning.

The five programs are:

• Program 1. Evolutionary dynamics of weed adaptation and herbicide resistance.
• Program 2. Biochemical, molecular and genetic basis of novel herbicide resistance.
• Program 3. Mitigation and management of weeds using novel and integrated approaches.
• Program 4. Capacity, expertise and collaborative uplift.
• Program 5. Communication, extension and adoption of weed research outputs.

In short, this project will investigate major herbicide resistant weeds causing problems to grain growers in the southern region using a suite of laboratory, pot and field studies to develop new knowledge about resistance evolution and management solutions to herbicide resistance. 

The Southern Node of the National operations - together with MFMG - will be responsible for a Weed Management Trial at Struan over the next ~4 years.

The key problems to be investigated include glyphosate and paraquat resistance in annual ryegrass and flax-leaf fleabane, pre-emergent herbicide resistance in annual ryegrass, glyphosate and Group 4 resistance in common sowthistle, glyphosate resistance in brome grass and barley grass, and Group 12 and Group 27 resistance in broadleaf weeds.

Research will be conducted with collaborators at SARDI and MFMG to better extend information to grain growers.

For more on the project head to the GRDC national Weed Management Initiative Project Page. 

 

Project Objectives

• Four regional nodes will be established: including one in the southern region (South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria) based within the University of Adelaide
• This initiative will help reduce the economic impact of weeds on our farming systems and foster a collaborative research environment capable of responding swiftly to emerging challenges.

 

This Project is supported by:

This project is supported by Grains Research and Development Corporation

and The University of Adelaide (Research Organisation)