Australian Farm Tillage Practices by Statistical Division, 1998-1999

Australian cropping farm data details the proportion using conservation, tillage, direct drilling, or traditional cultivation methods during 1998-1999. The dataset covers broadacre and dairy farms managed by owners, aggregated at the Statistical Division level. Data was collected via the Resource Management Supplementary survey accompanying the ABARE Annual farm survey.

Use Cases

• Map regional adoption of traditional cultivation with stubble ploughed in (tcstub_pl) versus burnt, cut, or grazed (tcstub_bu) using Sd code for spatial joins.
• Analyze correlation between hectares of agricultural land (Ag_land_ha) and prevalence of minimum tillage practices (mtstub_pl, mtstub_bu) across Statistical Divisions.
• Compare the proportion of farms using direct drilling into retained stubble (ddstub_pl) versus into treated stubble (ddstub_bu) to assess residue management trends.
• Identify Statistical Divisions (Sd name) with high or low aggregate adoption of conservation cropping techniques for historical benchmarking.

Strengths

• Data provides proportional metrics for six distinct tillage and residue management practices per region.
• Includes explicit geographic projection details (Albers Equal-Area Conic, WGS84) and is available in multiple geospatial formats (SHP, GEOJSON, WFS, WMS).

Limitations

• Temporal coverage is limited to a single year pair (1998-1999), offering no time-series analysis.
• Sample size and row count are unknown, and data uses placeholder values (-99999, -88888) for metropolitan and missing areas.

Provenance

Source

Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES), Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry.

Collection Method

Collected via the Resource Management Supplementary survey interview accompanying the ABARE Annual farm survey.

Time Range

1998-1999

Freshness

Data reflects 1998-1999 practices; metadata was last updated in 2026.

Geography

Australia, at the Statistical Division (SD) level.