2017 crop nutrition top-of-mind after big harvests

Victorian grower Stewart Hamilton is looking to diversify nutrition sources in 2017.

PHOTO: Clarisa Collis

Each year, GroundCover^TM follows a group of growers from across Australia as they manage the winter cropping season, opening a window to professional growers at work as they plan and adjust to a season’s challenges and opportunities. In this first instalment of the 2017 series, we introduce the year’s participants.

Allen and Jenny Buckley run a mixed farm at Waikerie in the South Australian Mallee. They grow wheat, canola, barley, triticale and cereal rye, legume crops for grazing, and are experimenting with cover cropping. They also run 1000 Merino ewes, half joined to Merino rams and half to terminal sires.

Average annual rainfall: 250 millimetres

Farm size: 5000 hectares

Waikerie, South Australia, grower Allen Buckley is keen to expand his use of cover crops.

PHOTO: Rebecca Jennings

Memberships: South Australian No-Till Farmers Association, Lowbank Agriculture Bureau, Mallee Sustainable Farming, Society of Precision Agriculture Australia, Grain Growers

Key recent changes: On the crop nutrition front, we have started supplementing synthetic fertilisers with chicken litter to improve soil biology. On the livestock side we have been developing a lamb feedlot using an inside/outside set-up so 33 per cent of the sheep’s space will be inside. We already have some lambs in and expect that it will be fully operational by mid-2017.

Goals for 2017: To look at the outcome of the cover crops and see whether we can use more winter as well as summer cover crops to improve the sustainability of the whole system. Having already seen how well the mixed crops work has given me confidence to try summer cropping. We sowed a mix of 10 species on 6 January and it has come away nicely.

Challenges and opportunities: Our challenges are summer weeds and the heavy stubble loads we have following big crops in 2016. Nutrient balance will be a big concern because of the high usage and loss last year. Opportunities will be to continue developing and promoting virtual fencing and improving my understanding of the role and management of cover crops. We believe cover crops are able to keep the soil temperature lower, preventing high soil moisture evaporation. This results in higher moisture levels despite cover crop water usage, as well as improved soil biology.

R&D wish list: Cover crops are the main item for me, not just for myself or farms in the Mallee, but all across Australia. I was fortunate enough to attend conferences in Kansas and Colorado and hear some of the best soil biology people speak, and I think this is where we need to be going. I’d also like to see more work on virtual fencing to keep it moving forward. From an environmental point of view, what we can achieve with that will be massive.

Stewart and Pip Hamilton, along with Stewart’s parents John and Hilary, run a mixed farming operation across two properties in central west and southern Victoria. They grow wheat, barley, canola, faba beans and linseed, as well as ryegrass and oats for hay. They also have 1000 head of Merino wethers for meat and wool.

Average annual rainfall: 500mm

Farm size: 3000ha owned, leased and share farmed, split over two properties at Inverleigh and Charlton

Use of professional advice: We work with a range of consultants including an agronomist, accountant and grain marketers.

Memberships: Victorian Farmers Federation, Birchip Cropping Group, Southern Farming Systems

Key recent changes: We purchased a new air seeder for 2016, a Horwood Bagshaw three-metre CTF with 12m bar. We have also been implementing paddock trials of slow-release fertilisers and growth regulators for canopy management in wheat, barley and canola. 

Goals for 2017: The plan is to do more fertiliser trials this year and try different sources of fertiliser – both synthetic and manures. We are mainly looking at potassium and nitrogen and how they interact with each other.

Challenges and opportunities: The biggest challenge is land availability. There is a lot of competition for land for those wanting to expand. Herbicide resistance is manageable, but still challenging. Opportunities exist for diversifying nutrition sources. There are a lot of waste products such as chook manure we could use but efficiency is the big challenge. Our soils at Inverleigh (in the south) are relatively poor in organic carbon. The topsoil is shallow and the subsoils are very hostile with clay. We are learning from our northern property (Charlton) about water holding capacity and trying to make our ‘bucket of water’ bigger.

R&D wish list: Our soil tests aren’t accurate enough. The test results we get for available N, P, K, S are not borne out by what we see in the paddock. The soil tests tell us the nutrient levels are fine but the plants will be struggling and showing signs of nitrogen stress. I’d also like to see a good pulse for this environment. We have grown faba beans for the past few years but it is always too hot, too wet or too dry for them. I would like to see improved compatibility in technology. There is a lot of technology available but if you cannot run it with your existing systems, it turns you off buying it. Social media though has been really good for farming, such as being able to follow agronomists in the Ukraine or the USA and receive live feeds about the weather.

Darren and Tanya Jensen farm at Biloela in central Queensland. They crop wheat, chickpeas, mungbeans and sorghum, and run 100 Senepol cross breeders.

Average annual rainfall: 710mm

Farm size: 1820 hectares cropped, some of which is share farmed, 240 hectares of cattle country

Use of professional advice: Agronomist, accountant and soil scientist.

Memberships: Central Queensland Grower Solutions, AgForce

Key recent changes: We purchased a new Boss TX65 Parallelogram Tyne Planter with coulter assembly. It is stronger and provides us with better breakout and seed soil contact on moisture-seeking chickpeas. Good prices last year meant we put in a lot more chickpeas. With no planting rain we couldn’t plant wheat.

Goals for 2017: Over the past few years with the way the Aussie dollar has been we have gone hard and bought a lot of machinery. Now we are looking at on-farm storage to give us more marketing options. We also want to maintain our ascochyta-free status in chickpeas. We are the only asco-free area in central Queensland, if not all of eastern Australia, which should allow us to be a chickpea seed production hub for eastern Australia.

Challenges and opportunities: The big challenge is herbicide resistance – we are all using too much chemical. To combat this, we bought a Brookfield disc chain – heavier-duty than a Kelly chain – and have gone back to minimum till rather than zero till. It allows us to deal with Feathertop Rhodes grass and fleabane mechanically rather than chemically. Nutrition is always a challenge here too because of the variable soils. We can have two or three different soil types in one paddock. We did look at using variable rate with yield mapping but the weakness is that some of the poorer areas don’t do better even with higher rates of nutrition. We’ve found we’re better off just going onto the computer and marking out the areas we want to put higher rates of fertiliser on. These are usually our better soils.

As far as opportunities go, we never know when it’s going to rain here so we can have spring, summer or winter crops. As opportunity croppers we have to have seed available at all times of the year so that means we don’t have a fixed mindset. I’m also looking forward to the new chickpea variety PBA SeamerA that has the highest-available ascochyta blight resistance.

R&D wish list: Combating the overuse of herbicides has to be a priority.

Greg and Tania Moody, with son and daughter-in-law Brett and Katie, farm at Hermidale, west of Nyngan in central New South Wales. They grow wheat, barley, grazing and milling oats, chickpeas, lupins and field peas, and run 800 Dorper ewes.

Average annual rainfall: 450mm

Farm size: 6870ha

Use of professional advice: Agronomist, accountant and grain marketing consultant.

Memberships: Kondinin Group, Conservation Agriculture and No-till Farming Association (CANFA), Central West Farming Systems

Key recent changes: We recently purchased an 18m Tobin Bullet disc seeder to assist in the timeliness of sowing and to complement our 17m Conservapak tine seeder. We are moving into a 3m controlled traffic system and while the seeders don’t currently fit the system, the header is 12m and the boom spray is 36m. We bought the disc seeder to speed up sowing, but the jury is out on how it will go on our soil types in average seasons. Our biggest concern is the lack of broken soil beneath the seed – we have hard-setting red soils. We have been minimum tilling since 1994. The soil is changing, but still retains the inherent hardness.

Goals for 2017: We are implementing a fertiliser spreading program with sulphate of ammonia in our stubble and just bought a 14 tonne Marshall 914T Multispread to assist with our nutrition program. We did extensive soil tests in December to establish our fertility levels, which we knew would be low after the big crops we pulled out in 2016. We are using the new spreader to do lime and gypsum trials, and continuing a trace element program that we have been working on for the past five years. Our goal is to find the missing links to increase protein and yield levels in our wheat. Our other goal is finding out how to retain flowers and pods in lupins, which flower well but then abort the flowers. We can’t adjust our sowing time too much or they won’t yield, so we really want to get to the bottom of why it is happening and how we can retain the flowers to convert to pods and yield.

Challenges and opportunities: We have had three good seasons in a row and the challenge now is to maintain productivity if we have another good year. I’m hopeful the fertiliser program will help with that. Another challenge will be how to market the low-value crops to meet budget, due to a $100-a-tonne drop in commodity prices over the past 12 months. We are also dealing with a heavy stubble load – everything was harvested at 30cm – and exploring how we can get good seedling emergence without burning. We may use a residue manager before the discs to enable a clean planting.

R&D wish list: Frost tolerance is at the top of the list so we can sow early.

Michael and Rochelle Nichols and their five children have a mixed farming enterprise at Sisters Creek in north-western Tasmania. He crops wheat, pyrethrum, poppies, potatoes, canola, mustard, peas and onions, and runs 80 Friesian steers. He has a contract harvesting business which sells wheat to local dairy farmers and a small oil press for bottled canola oil sales.

Average annual rainfall: 1200mm

Farm size: 160-385ha cropping, 100ha pasture for beef and dairy, pine plantation and native bushland

Use of professional advice: Agronomists and accountant

Memberships: Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association, Poppy Growers Tasmania, Southern Farming Systems, Precision Farming Tasmania, Boat Harbour Discussion Group (local farmers and agronomists)

Key recent changes: The family has completed some succession planning and we sowed buckwheat for the first time in January. I also completed the GRDC Grain Farm Leaders Program in 2016 – the first Tasmanian to have done so! It provided great networking and opportunities to learn about different peoples’ farming operations.

Goals for 2017: I have a program called PAM UltraCrop, which is a management tool that tracks inputs and yield and calculates net return per crop. I have used it on a desktop for some years but I can now use a cloud-based version on my phone. We’ll be using more precision agriculture tools this year: more NDVI to determine where crop variation is occurring and adjust the nutrition accordingly. I’ll be doing prescription mapping for fertiliser application.

Challenges and opportunities: For the first time this year we have some Group A and Group B resistant ryegrass and that is going to be an issue to manage. We have so many different contractors and specialised machinery and equipment coming onto the property we need to be very vigilant about hygiene. Another challenge is meeting all the guidelines for the various quality assurance systems we have in place for onions, pyrethrum and poppies. Low commodity prices are also a real pain. Opportunities include new markets for our canola oil – both bottled and bulk.

R&D wish list: Better wheat varieties for high-rainfall areas – there is already some work going on in this area with FAR (Foundation for Arable Research). We need varieties that are more resistant to fungal diseases such as Septoria tritici and eyespot. I would also like to see much better compatibility of precision agriculture systems.

Jason and Renaye Stokes, with Jason’s parents Barry and Marg, farm in the Chapman Valley north of Geraldton in the mid-west region of Western Australia. The Stokes family crop 3800 hectares of wheat, barley, oats, canola and lupins and mate 6500 ewes annually.

Average annual rainfall: 400mm, 380mm growing season

Farm size: 5200ha owned, leased and share farmed

Use of professional advice: Accountant, agronomist, farm business consultant and grain marketing consultant.

Memberships: GRDC Regional Cropping Solutions Network – Geraldton Port Zone

Key recent changes: Personnel changes in the past 12 months mean we will start to use more contractors for machinery maintenance and capital improvement, while we focus on grain and livestock production.

Goals for 2017: This will be a year of consolidation in the form of income maximisation and debt reduction. We are fortunate in that over the past five years we have purchased a whole new set of plant equipment. We will be increasing our cropped area and maintaining stock numbers. Last year we cut out some of our cropping area because we were low on stockfeed at the end of 2015 following a poor finish. Cropping prices weren’t great so we converted that across. This year we will include more lupins and canola in the rotation. Our rationale is partly due to commodity prices but it will also lead to a balancing of our rotation down the track. This will give us the opportunity to capitalise on wheat prices if they improve in the future.

Challenges and opportunities: Our main challenge is input costs: being able to grow a crop cheap enough to make it profitable. That is why we still have livestock in our operation. Our soil type and landscape also dictate that we can’t crop all of it. As far as opportunities go, we are confident that we have our paddocks pretty well set up for the year. Now we’re just waiting for some good opening rain in April.

R&D wish list: Understanding the impact of deep ripping on heavier soil types. We are starting to do a bit of deep ripping and, while we’ve seen a biomass response, it doesn’t necessarily convert to yield. Most of the existing research work deals with the lighter sandier soils and there isn’t much information around for our soil types, so I’d like to know more about that.

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Double-cropping to absorb seasonal shocks

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Stubble retention challenge

Region North, Overseas, South, West