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• About FullStop FullStop Wetting Front Detectors are the result of research done at CSIRO Land & Water, Australia and the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Dr Richard Stirzaker and his team were presented with the WatSave Technology Award for Water Conservation in Agriculture by the International Commission for Irrigation and Drainage in 2003 for the development of the FullStop Wetting Front Detector. There are now thousands in use around the world. This site is sponsored/owned by CSIRO and provides information for anyone who has invested in a FullStop or who is curious about what they are and how they work. It is continually updated and it is a place where you can feed back your experience (HOT LINK) so that we can all learn how to irrigate more responsibly. 
It should be easy to irrigate accurately. Soil holds water like a sponge. Each day the plants extract some of this water via their roots and transpire it through their leaves. Some water also evaporates from the soil surface. Accurate irrigation is simply replacing what has been lost. However it's not always so easy. The FullStop Wetting Front Detector helps you to visualise what is happening down in the root zone when you irrigate the soil. FullStops are buried in the root zone and pop up an indicator to show when water has passed them. This site guides you through some of the mysteries of what happens down in the soil when we apply water at the top and helps to make sense of fertiliser and salt readings measured from the soil solution. When you start to use the FullStop there will be times when the indicator does not pop up when you think it should. There will also be times it does pop up when you think it should not. We have spent seven years studying the response of FullStop in a whole range of crops and soil types with different types of irrigation. When FullStops did not behave as we expected we almost always learnt something new! The site brings together this knowledge.  Richard Stirzaker's first job after leaving the University of Sydney in 1983 was to manage a fully solar powered irrigation system for vegetable crops. He relied on tensiometers to keep the whole operation running smoothly. After a while he found himself a slave to these devices - always running around the farm trying in vain to keep each plot between the desired limits. He then moved to using the trusty neutron probe, but there simply weren't enough hours in the day to take all the readings. When the first TDR (Time Domain Reflectometry) units came out he discovered the whole new world of continuous soil water content logging - every 15 minutes day and night. But soon he had so much data he did not know what to do with it all!  Having grown vegetables from back yard to commercial scale, and researched irrigation on large farms in Australia to smallholdings in Africa, he set out to build the simplest device possible to help irrigators better understand water. Richard is currently a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Land and Water in Canberra, Australia and honorary Professor in the Department of Plant Production and Soil Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa. His passion for growing vegetables and understanding our use of water is reflected in his own garden which is bursting with fruit trees, vegetables, flowers and devices for measuring water in soil. The initial development was carried out in the late 90's by Richard Stirzaker and Paul Hutchinson of CSIRO. Together with the University of Pretoria, the idea was refined until a manufacturer, Agriplas Pty Ltd, came on board to produce the final product. The road from concept to product was long and difficult, made possible by some wonderful people who bought their knowledge, made opportunities and lent encouragement at just the right time. The Wetting Front Detector project has been funded by CSIRO, the Water Research Commission of South Africa and the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. This site was produced by Dr Joyce Wilkie, an enthusiastic market gardener and FullStop user who also runs Allsun Farm Press, an on-farm, web publishing business specialising in manuals and books. |