 Hi, my name is Liz Humphries and I'm a water scientist Erie, so we're at Ackermann Lees Agronomy Rice Challenge, the wet-seeded rice field. Establishments are a bit patchy in places, they said some of it's due to birds, some of it's due to low-lying areas. So that's the first, one of the first issues with water management is wet-seeded rice currently is really sensitive to water. If you have too much water the seeds die and so that's why you need really good levelling and secondly it's why we really need to get anaerobic germination tolerance into rice seeds so that the technology is less difficult and less risky for farmers. So this field was lucky after it was established there was where a few showers of rain which kept it going nicely, I don't think it's been irrigated yet but Ackermann's just applying fertilizer and so the ideal thing next will be to irrigate to wash the fertilizer into the soil. One way to reduce the amount of irrigation water we apply to rice is to do what we call alternate wetting and drying. So this means we flood the field, then we let the water disappear, we let the surface dry down and then we re-irrigate again and that the anybody can do alternate wetting and drying but the question is how do you do it safely so that you don't lose any yield because rice is so sensitive to too much drying. So over the years Erie's done a lot of research and they've found that if we let the soil dry down below about 10 or 15 kilopascals, soil water tension at about 15 centimetres below the soil surface the rice suffers but 10 or 15 kilopascals probably doesn't mean anything to you and it doesn't mean anything to farmers. Over the last 24 hours since we got this beautiful sun and warm weather the plants have really started to jump out really started to grow it's getting a bit dry the water table's about 15 centimetres below the surface so I see you've just fertilized so it's the ideal time to irrigate. Yeah we need to really get water on I can see when I walk through there are patches where it gets pretty dry and even some bees are coming so I'm getting quite worried but there are also some low-lying places over there where it hasn't germinated that well so I'm worried that if you put too much water on we might even kill off more you know so we've got to find the right balance but a little bit of water is needed now. Some really nice work with this really simple field water tube which just shows you where the water table is. You can pull it out I think. Let's go and install one and the place where it should be. 15 centimetres from the bottom so you should push it into the mark you can go a little bit further it doesn't matter. Okay put the rod in here and I need to get it straight right yep oh it's so easy Jesus yeah oh look at this oh soft like cake okay okay you're there now stick your hands inside and take all the soil out what if somebody something bites me in there oh you'll be right okay okay how often do we think I need to come out and check this oh well it depends on the weather for a start and it's but at least once a week right yeah at least once a week yeah these soils hold the hold the water pretty well and the water table's very shallow here because you're more or less around a guy flooded fields okay I'm going to come and look at least twice a week because I feel trusted I'd start with twice a week because you don't know what you're doing and once you get to know you feel better then you need to look less often yeah it's now a week later and we've kept the water in the field on as a shallow water layer just a few centimetres mainly because we wanted to make sure that we can avoid some wheat grows in the areas of John's as low line so so far it looks quite good so we haven't been able to do a full alternating and drying yet but we'll move to that once the canopy is closed so but for now we're going to keep a shallow water layer and we'll see how the crop develops now during tillering