Tully Pathways Project

The Tully Pathways Project (TPP) is a practice change project, designed to encourage sugarcane growers in the Tully mill area to adopt practices that improve productivity and profitability while delivering positive environmental outcomes.

The TPP is part of the larger Reefwise Farming Project, administered by Terrain NRM in the Wet Tropics. The Reefwise Farming Project supports farmers through targeted extension and on-ground activities to drive practice change and improve water quality outcomes for the Great Barrier Reef. The Reefwise Farming Project is a $30 million Australian Government investment and part of the $192 million Clearer Water for a Healthy Reef funding package.

The TPP is one of the latest in a succession of practice change projects delivered by agronomists from the SRA Tully research station. This continuation enables the TPP to complement similar recent and current activities, build on relationships with growers and their advisors, and take advantage of efficiencies gained through experience delivering similar projects.

The overall objective is to improve water quality in Great Barrier Reef catchments. For the TPP, this means the catchments of the Tully, Murray and Kennedy rivers in the southern Wet Tropics. This objective will be achieved by working one-on-one with cane growers to develop farm management plans, engaging groups of growers in workshops on priority practice-change topics, and sharing productivity insights from the project demonstration site. The project team will also share demonstration site results with the Paddock to Reef team to support their catchment models. The demonstration site is supported by the Terrain NRM water quality monitoring team, who will also continue to monitor local in-stream water quality. The objective is to observe the relationship between edge-of-paddock flow and stream nutrient concentrations, improving understanding of the link between farm- and sub-catchment-scale nutrient transport processes.