Tender Advertisement #1411808

Hort Innovation is the not-for-profit, grower-owned research and development corporation for Australia’s $16 billion horticulture industry. We invest more than $120M per year in research and development, marketing and trade activities to build a prosperous and sustainable future for growers.
Hort Innovation is seeking a suitably qualified, experienced and capable delivery partner for the project: Improving avocado irrigation efficiency and effectiveness in Australia (AV23013).
The objectives of the services being sought are to:
• Develop regionally specific best practice guidelines for irrigation, encompassing agronomic variability, salinity management, drought mitigation, maintenance procedures, self-assessment checklists, establishing standardised industry terminology, consultation with Irrigation Australia for alignment, and guidance on best supporting irrigation tools, selection, usage and placement.
• Conduct comprehensive sap flow research with dendrometers to quantify avocado water usage, correlation to optimising yield/quality, determine crop factors for each climate zone for each various growth stage, identify precise water requirements, enhance water use efficiency, soil oxygen levels, optimise irrigation timing to reduce tree stress, and plant sensors in orchard monitoring.
• Collate local and global avocado research in addition to other relevant crops to date that compares drip and sprinkler methods at a regional scale correlation to optimising WUE/yield/quality, focusing on crop-specific design, soil types, assessing pros and cons, evaluating cost-effectiveness, referencing case studies and grower experiences, incorporating knowledge from other crops, and optimising transition from mini-sprinkler to drip systems. Identify any gaps or further research needs that can be scoped under this program.
• Develop a grower friendly self-assessment checklist to be used on the avocado BPR and other grower friendly formats, to evaluate irrigation system performance and understanding. Facilitate best practice audits, enabling growers to assess and improve water efficiency, uniformity, monitoring, and soil property awareness.
• Assess the viability of a cost-effective single solution that uses multi variate data sources as a single source of truth for irrigation management catering for early stage to advanced users.
• Review cost effective and novel remote sensing technologies for water stress detection and efficient irrigation and their potential role for best practice.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of overhead evaporative cooling in relevant regions and define trigger points that address tree stress, yield and pollination.
Hort Innovation has prepared a Request for Proposal (RFP) document that provides background information, outlines the scope of services, the procurement process and the information required from interested parties.
The RFP may be downloaded from www.tenders.net (you will need to be a member of tenders.net to access this information).
The closing date for responses is December 12, 2023 3:00 PM (AEDT).