RESEARCH from CSIRO has found pulses, mainly lentils and chickpeas, can be sown deep - down to 20 centimetres - without suffering biomass and yield losses or changes to flowering.
The research comes as the result of proof of concept trials run by CSIRO in Merredin and Dandaragan last year.
In Western Australia, pulses used to be grown quite extensively and were seen as beneficial to have in a program rotation, however many farmers pulled back after the fungal disease, ascochyta blight, came through in the late 1990s.
CSIRO researcher Sarah Rich said she started looking at sowing depth for chickpeas and lentils as a quick and easy solution in order to de-risk them enough for farmers to grow them a bit more.
"Lentils and chickpeas, in particular, are different to a lot of cropping plants in that instead of sending up the coleoptiles, those stay underground, which means you can sow them pretty deeply," Dr Rich said.
"During the trials at 20cm, we found no significant impact on emergence time, establishment or flowering and our yields were pretty much the same between the deep sown plots and the shallow sown plots at the normal 5cm."
The main benefit of being able to sow the pulses deeper is the ability to chase soil moisture and get them in the ground at the optimal sowing window.
Dr Rich said in WA, particularly in the medium to low rainfall zones, the earlier growers can get their chickpeas and lentils in, the better yield they're going to get.
"Autumn rainfall can be pretty unpredictable and lately we've been finding autumn has warmer temperatures which means even if you do get a bit of rainfall, the soil surface dries out very quickly so the ideal seedbed conditions at the surface are short lived," Dr Rich said.
"However, being able to place the seed deeper into the moisture can really overcome those constraints and open up a nice earlier sowing window for growers to get them in and do so without messing with their normal wheat, barley and canola cropping programs."
Dr Rich said the results from the trial had exceeded their expectations.
"We had trials at Merredin and Dandaragan on quite different soil types with different seasons and we got very similar results in both places," he said.
"Just from grower days, we've had a lot of farmers are excited about the idea of even being able to sow 10 or 15cm because it opens up a lot of options for them."