[00:00:05] Sally Maguire This is a GRDC podcast. Hello, I'm Sally Maguire. Widespread frosts on top of a very dry season mean that southern growers are having to make some tough decisions. So let's jump right into it with consulting agronomist, Martin Culbert, who joins me now from the road somewhere in the border of New South Wales and Victoria. And Martin, you're currently spending your days assessing the extent of the frost damage to crops across several regions. What are you seeing and how a growers faring over there?

[00:00:39] Martin Colbert What I'm seeing is the result of quite an intense impact that came after several nights of well below zero temperatures and I've done a lot of frost work in the past and I've never seen something quite to this extent. And further on from that, I'd have never seen it quite so widespread geographically. I've gone from Lamaroo right across the Victorian Mallee and now I'm heading back down into the Victorian Wimmera to do some more work there and although there's places that have had less I don't think I've found anywhere that hasn't got some impact.

[00:01:12] Sally Maguire So talk to me about the type of damage that you're seeing to the kind of crops.

[00:01:17] Martin Colbert Where a fair bit of the focus has been immediately has been by people wanting to make the hay decision and that's a salvage decision and they've been looking at their cereals and in the wheat the extent of the impact there has been to take out individual positions within the head. And that's quite commonplace. But alarmingly, what it has done is it's taken a severe freeze to the whole head so every position is lost mainly to the primary tiller, which is where most of their yield comes from but on top of that, it's been cold enough to take out a lot of positions in the secondary and tertiary tillers as well. And then the losses really start to mount up. A lot of barley crops have been impacted, but to be honest, it's a little bit too early to get a firm grip on the impact because they were just at a stage where it's hard to determine, but I can't imagine that they've escaped. Barley can handle frost a little bit better, but it's not going to have escaped, that's for sure. Canola is also being laid down in the rows for hay very quickly because it's actually probably been hit the hardest and farmers have been able to make a decision there very quickly without the use of someone like myself, because as soon as they open any pod, it's just 100 per cent gone. So it's quite a blow to the oilseed production side of the game. If we shift over into legumes - field peas, they're just toasted and they're a very frost susceptible plant anyway. Very rarely do you see impact in beans. But around the Lamaroo/Pinaroo area where there are fully faba beans grown, the impact there to any bean in a pod has been to take it out and it's also taken a lot of flowers out. There is a bit of re-flowering going on, but given the time of year and how close the first 30 degree day is, a lot of those flowers won't make it through to fruition. What's on the tip of everyone's tongue is our big cash crop, lentils, and there's been a lot of easily to identify vegetative frost. You can see that at 100km an hour and that's taking the nice, lush green to a pale, sickly looking colour across the crop. But closer inspection, which is what is required of the existing pods, shows there's been a severe impact to the lentils. Some of those pods will contain one seed that might make it through the harvester into the box, but it'll be the lower grade quality so there's is also going to be quality issues amongst the lentils that do manage to be harvested.

[00:03:46] Sally Maguire So tell me, what are you advising those affected growers to do as step one?

[00:03:51] Martin Colbert Step one is to take a big breath and settle down and approach the situation logically, and that is to get out there and conduct an assessment of the entire paddock and get a grasp of where the worst impact is before a salvage decision, which is essentially a hay decision is made. There may be areas within the paddock that you can portion out a big concern on some farmers where the worst impact is to the extent of where am I going to get next year's seed from? So with a bit of scouting, they'll be able to locate a part of the paddock that hasn't been hit and it will have contained viable seed. This frost has been severe enough that it's defined topography, so quite often there's plenty of damage on the top of the hill as the side of the hill is in the valleys. So it will take a little bit more work. I've developed a spreadsheet arrangement or an in-paddock calculator that just requires time and some very basic maths and a biro to conduct. And they can come out at the end of that with a result they can make a decision from there based on data as to what their next step is.

[00:04:56] Sally Maguire What's the best-case scenario and what's the worst-case scenario for growers out there?

[00:05:01] Martin Colbert As far as the crop production goes, there are paddocks, particularly canola, that are 100 per cent smoked. That's the worst-case scenario and it doesn't make the best hay, so even to put it into square bales it'll have to wait till the next drought before it sells. There'll be plenty of other hay of better quality that'll sell first. So that's a pretty bad scenario. Lentils, if they're totally gone, we can't really make hay out of them anyway, so that'll just be a spray it out option to try and conserve moisture and fix some weeds up while you're at it. So there'll be zero income, but all the inputs that have gone in to pay for, so that's a worst case scenario. So there's plenty of worst case scenarios. The best case scenario is that somehow you've missed it. In past events, there's been a little bit more stored soil moisture and the crops been able to stage a recovery and the spring stayed mild. It's amazing how a crop can recover, but it needs cool weather, it needs ample moisture, and a sound set up. Well, a lot of those crops had a sound setup, but there is no stored moisture. We've all got very little faith in the forecast delivering rains and we all know that the first 30 degree day isn't far away. There's a good reason why all the brown snakes are out and about. I've had several encounters with them over the last few days. They know the warm weather is coming, and so do I.

[00:06:21] Sally Maguire Yes. Well, just talk to me a little bit more about that, because it's a bit of a double whammy for some growers because it's been a very dry season already. So they've got stressed plants that have now had a frost.

[00:06:32] Martin Colbert That's right. If ever there was a perfect timing for severe frost impact, it couldn't have done it better. Well-managed crops have been running a good level of biomass and a good level of biomass is extracting more water from the profile. And so the profile has been emptied or getting close to empty and the plants are already beginning to show a bit of stress. Nothing that the proverbial good inch of rain wouldn't have fixed, but that hadn't arrived. And instead of it arriving, we had a very slow-moving, high-pressure system come in over a number of days and deliver those very cold temperatures for prolonged periods to three nights. And so what's happened - the resilience of the plants reduced that results in a greater impact of frost but given that there's no real easily accessible moisture near the surface, the plant's ability to produce recovery tillers, which are little tiny things, but they can end up making a, I'll put it in old talk - a couple of bags to the acre difference to the final yield. There's just not enough moisture there to bring them through. And in regards to the canola, it was at a stage where it finished flowering, so it had set its potential. So it's not going to re-flower, it's just lost. There is a little bit of potential for the legumes, particularly lentils, to have another crack, but it's never going to be what it was. It requires cool temperature and precipitation. And although I'm sitting here with a few raindrops falling on the roof at the moment, there's not real precipitation forecast.

[00:08:06] Sally Maguire So we know that we're never really going to get rid of frost, so looking to the future, what are some of the strategies or the agronomic practices that can help reduce either the severity or the probability of frost occurring at that critical flowering stage?

[00:08:21] Martin Colbert We're never going to get away from frost. In fact, I spent a lot of time in the paddock looking at all sorts of other perils, primarily hail, and we're always looking at crops every year, and there's always a background of frost. It's just a part of crop production. It's when it's severe that it's dire like it is at the moment. Farmers have been farming successfully for 150 years through the Wimmera and 100 years most other places, they've already got frost management strategies in place and that'll be a diversification of enterprises within the farm. It'll be a range of crops, it'll be a geographic spread of operations generally they won't plant the most susceptible crops in the most frost prone area. But this is old news to farmers they're already practising all those things. I guess the new frontier of how we can help minimise those impacts is with more precise management of our crops. Crops that lack resilience are impacted the most, and a lot of that comes down to what's going on in the plant. Some of those deficiencies can be addressed by application of trace elements to help strengthen it, and those decisions are made off soil testing and leaf testing and figuring out what the crop actually needs to make it the strongest. But nothing fixes up the situation more than adequate moisture. So we need to continue conserving moisture. We somehow need to relocate our farms under the next big storm.

[00:09:49] Sally Maguire Sounds like a good idea. We're going to include some resources in the show notes for this podcast on frost strategies. What would be your estimation from what you're hearing and what you're seeing about the dollar value or the extent of the losses for this season?

[00:10:05] Martin Colbert We won't be able to put a hard and fast figure on that because the figures that are currently being touted by Australia's primary source of production are a little bit inflated at the moment. Last time I saw ABARE's - we are going to know what finally comes off because it will get delivered but to probably put an answer to your question, I was having a rough think about the area I drove across yesterday from the South Australian Mallee, across the Victorian Mallee. So I'm not talking about including the Wimmera here or anywhere in New South Wales that's also been hit. I would suggest that there's been a loss of 200,000 tonne of canola if you want to say that's got a market value of $800 a tonne, perhaps that's a massive amount of money. Someone else can do the maths on there. There's just too many zeros there. I don't really want to think about it. There's been a massive hit to the wheat, a massive hit, to barley. So look, it'll be in the area I went across there'd be tens of millions of dollars easily. And that way there's plenty of bad news through the Wimmera I haven't got to yet and other consultants in our group are encountering plenty of it in New South Wales. So it's going to take a massive dent in Australia's gross domestic product, that's for sure.

[00:11:16] Sally Maguire And in your time working in this business, have you seen a frost event like this before?

[00:11:21] Martin Colbert I've seen severe frost events, but they've been in the paddock that's been somewhere that is in a zone that would always get frosted and I've seen 100 per cent taken out in a wheat crop before at Pinaroo, for example. But then on the paddock next to it, which was up a hill, it was probably only 30 per cent in the paddock that was on top of the hill had no impact at all. This season it's taken out the Malley, the side of the hill and the hill. I've never seen such widespread impact across all types of terrain in a district and across so many crops. So this is without a doubt the biggest frost impact I've ever seen.

[00:11:57] Sally Maguire And I guess just finally, as you chat to these growers, what's your sort of final advice or words that you're leaving them with regards to, you know, next season and getting over the losses?

[00:12:08] Martin Colbert Look, after the crop you've got because there's not a lot of it. Go with data, get out there and get some notes written down so that you've got a source to look at in future times about why you took an action and what your thresholds were to take that action. Use this as an opportunity to clean up some weeds. If you do, go in and cut it for hay remember to spray it as well to get rid of some of those problem weeds, which of course means spending more money. But it's money you'll save later. And most of all to remember that we are good farmers in a difficult environment and this time in the battle, the environment won but don't forget that you're a good farmer and that you'll farm successfully in years to come.

[00:12:47] Sally Maguire Well, that's very good advice. Thank you for joining me today Martin, I know you're very busy. That was consulting agronomist, Martin Colbert. Growers wanting more information may also like to watch Mallee Sustainable Farming's ‘Better Frost Decisions’ webinar available on YouTube. It contains some additional information for growers whose crops have been affected by frost. The GRDC Frost Management web page also contains handy resources on decision-making post frost events.

And, importantly, if you or someone you know is feeling stressed about the situation or finding it difficult to cope, please seek help. Help is available. iFarmWell offers a free online tool kit to help farmers cope effectively with life’s challenges and LifeLine is also available 24/7 on 13 11 44.

I’m Sally Maguire, this has been a GRDC podcast - thanks for listening.