Causes of wheat yield gaps and opportunities to advance the water-limited yield frontier in Australia

Closing the yield gap is essential for global food security and for farmers who face increasing costs of production. Recent work showed that Australia’s wheat growers are achieving about half their water-limited yield. While quantifying the yield gap is a necessary first step towards closing them, the next step is to understand which factors constrain rainfed grain growers from achieving their water-limited yields. Here we conducted in silico experiments over 15 years at 50 weather stations to ascertain the impact on grain yield of suboptimal practices against the ‘best management practice’ rules that were used to calculate the benchmark water-limited yields. Average national losses per suboptimal practice were: the average N fertiliser application rate – 40%; conventional tillage – 33%; suboptimal weed control during the summer fallow – 26%; low seedling density – 12%; and a two week delay in sowing – 7%. Combining two suboptimal practices does not necessarily lead to an additive effect on yield. Other factors that contribute to the yield gap include biotic stresses such as plant diseases, insects and other pests, in-crop weeds and extreme weather events (e.g. floods, strong winds and hail). In addition to calculating the impact of causes of the yield gap we investigated the opportunity to lift the water-limited yield by adopting an emergent new management practice of sowing on an optimised site specific date that is earlier than the traditional sowing window as described for the currently accepted best practice. We found that this emergent practice, matched with slower maturing varieties and additional N inputs as required, has the potential to increase wheat yields nationally by 30%. Frost and heat stress accounted for losses of 16% to 26% depending on the stress function used. Allowing for the impact of frost and heat stress reduced the yield potential of both the current and emergent water-limited yields yet it did not reduce the advantage of the emergent practice.