CTF Australia December 1, 2010

Another busy day from 8 am to 10 pm. We visited four farms, one manufacturer, lawyers and had supper with a cropping club.

Its been unusually cool here and wet so crop quality has suffered and fusarium is a huge concern.

Our first stop of the day was at Peter Bach's near Darby. He is a young farmer who has dryland and irrigated land and is an excellent machinery builder. He is on a 3 m system with a 40 foot seeder and 42 foot header (Australians use both metric and imperial). He seeds in 15 and 30 inch rows. His sunflower crop looked great. We saw an excellent example of compaction affecting the root. 

He has built a shrouded sprayer, added cotton reesl to a front wheel assist tractor and numerous other projects.

One of his recently harvested fields showed what can happen to tramlines - soil punched out to the side. Is this a reason not to tramline? I'd say no. Can you imagine what the field would have looked liked if it was random traffic? He plans to leave the tram, no repair and figures it will correct itself to a large degree. Some of his soils will move up to 6 inches.

Its a bit hard to tell but the ridge is probably a foot above the bottom of the tram.

Our next stop was at Kerry Juede's. It was our first place with a lot of new or recently purchased equipment. They are on a 3 m system with a 11 m planter and 22 m sprayer. The seeder and a separate NH3 unit were on 3 point hitches. They were trying a new Daybreak disc unit on their seeder. Sorghum was seeded on 1 m row.

We had a brief stop at Daybreak Manufacturing. Ross was a key person in developing disk units and CTF. You probably would not want to go with anything less than 15 inch rows with this unit, its too heavy, but very rugged. He talked in systems and four key things - weed control, CTF, inter-row and nutrient maintenance all in a zero till system. An advantage of the disk unit is speed. 10 -20 km/hr, but you do need to slow down in sticky soils.

Lunch was provided by a small law firm in Darby. They were interested in surface rights and the group shared their experiences and learned about some of the issues facing farmers here.

Rod and Sally McCreath started on a 2 m systems but switched to 3 m. They crop a 1000 acres and have about 2000 grazing acres for cows. Like most guys they have gradually modified their equipment. One key change to his systems has been to start seeding up and down the slopes.

The slopes are substantial - maybe 4% in some cases. Its working well and erosion is not a big issue as long as they keep all of their residue intact. Tim Neale says this works by keeping the profile dry (right cropping) and minimizing concentration of water flow so it cannot build up energy and cause erosion.

They have been able to integrate livestock but mostly keep livestock off of the cropped land other then say grazing on oats in the winter.

Our last farm visit was with John Piper and his father. They have converted to up and down the slopes and put up with abuse from neighbors. There was some erosion in the trams on their field but they are working to reduce that as they get the system working. On both Rod and John's there was a lot of contouring of the soil. It probably has hindered CTF but is very expensive and unnecessary to remove.

We were treated to a great supper with the Top Crop Group, farmers who meet once a month to discuss what is happening on their farms. Jay and I made our presentations on surface rights and Alberta agriculture.

We toured some pretty country today and met wonderful people. Tomorrow we visit five manufacturers and work our way back to Brisbane.