Technical officer Nawash Haddad has found a way to ashere soil cores onto a wooden backing, using a water soluble resin that soaks into the soil and holds it together. Roy Lawrie watches as Nawash Haddad prepares an intact core for framing with artwork that tells its story.

Soil scientists have developed a series of frame-mounted cores from all over NSW as a mobile, all-weather teaching aid to promote sustainable soil management.

The idea is to introduce people to the wide range of soil types in NSW, by offering them for display at field days, educational courses and meetings.

The soil profiles are constructed from solid, intact, one-metre deep cores, 150 millimetres in diameter, extracted from the ground by a truck-mounted auger.

Each framed core contains all the cracks, worm channels, roots and colour patterns, showing the habitats soils provide for plants and the millions of other organisms that live in it.

The captions, photos and artwork in the frames also tell stories about how soils have been used and how the use has influenced the history of New South Wales.

So far, NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI) technical officer, Nawash Haddad, has constructed about 50 frames, now used at various DPI offices to highlight soil types in their respective regions.

The NSW branch of the Australian Society of Soil Science has partially supported the project.

Mr Haddad’s colleague on the project, DPI soils chemist Roy Lawrie, says the profiles highlight the importance of the subsoil to plant growth.

“The subsoil is the part of the profile critical for storing and releasing moisture,” Mr Lawrie said.

“Given the current dry conditions, it is sometimes surprising to see how much moisture it can hold, but roots must be able to gain access.”

“In many of the cores, roots can be seen penetrating deeply into the profile,” he said.

Plants growing on deep, well-structured soils will usually have bigger root systems and survive droughts much better than where the subsoil is salty, strongly acidic, full of rocks or contains very dense poorly-structured clay.

As a practical observation about farming the latter type, Mr Lawrie suggests that when the drought ends, producers should consider whether these areas deserve the same investment of seed and fertiliser as other paddocks where growth persists much longer in dry spells.

The mix of soils science and history includes two cores from areas where Aborigines camped and used fire to help them hunt.

Another two profiles from Sydney typify why the early settlers experienced difficulty growing food until they found alluvial soils along the Hawkesbury River, still being farmed today.

Then there are examples of some of our most versatile soils for agriculture – heavier black soils, which grow rich native pastures for extensive grazing, the lighter red country where cropping was concentrated and the red volcanic soils that support dairy farming along the coast. The final segment of the display features heavy clay from the Riverina, once considered too difficult to farm, where rice now grows and a profile with a loamy topsoil over a dense acidic clay subsoil, a combination of features common in eastern NSW.

Previously used only for grazing, soils like these now support vegetable growing and many vineyards.

Contact Roy Lawrie,Camden(02) 4633 8327, roy.lawrie@dpi.nsw.gov.au