Today was cool, cloudy and windy with a high of about 15C. So much for the rumors about how hot it is in Australia. We visited several farmers north and east of Ballarat and then drove into Melbourne where we will meet with GRDC (Grains Research Development Corporation) tonight and tomorrow.
Most of our visits were on the treeless plains (original state). Troy Missen has a CTF system similar to Ruwoldt’s. He is using an Excel disk seeder. He has a down to earth operation and suggested that we need to be practical and not to let the details and highly accurate measurements drive us batty. It’s probably not worth the worry.
He has been experiencing problems with rabbits, and slugs. Slugs are particularly bad this year due to high moisture and high residue. The baits have been ineffective. Annual rye grass is also a problem in some fields.
He uses liquid fertilizer and has gone to applying several times during the growing season. It has saved him money over putting most of the fertilizer on at seeding.
Our second visit was to Rowan Peel’s. He is the farm manager. He started no till and CTF journey in 1996. Raised beds sort of forced him into CTF. Raided beds were established because of excessive moisture. He moved to 3 M CTF recently and removed the beds. However he plans to establish 3 M beds on about 40 to 50% of his land. He will also increase his row width to 12 inches. One interesting thing he does is windrow his canola with his combine header but will likely straight cut in the future.
Josh Walter manages a 1200 ha farm that also has an outdoor farrowing enterprise. For the most part they do not mix the livestock and cropping land. Only 100 hectares is used for the pigs and sheep. It was the first place we got to see a seeder in operation.
Josh is probably the most enthusiastic user of GPS/GIS data on farm I have met. They are able to integrate the pig manure into the cropping but it does compromise the CTF a bit. However the results are outstanding. He uses yield data, proximate sensor data, high resolution satellite data and identifies and attempt to solve issues that show up. He sees endless possibilities and used the phrase “special awareness”. It’s important to know what is going on your crop land, capturing that information and using it to your advantage.
He has up to 14 or 15 experiments going on each year. He says trials are not hard to do and not time consuming. Of course Andrew and Tim of Precision Agriculture are able to help him gather and analyze his data.
We visited with two brothers who, Ben and Tom Jenz, are just getting into CTF. They have very small equipment but are able to cover a lot of ground. Unfortunately their crops had taken a beating from the rain. Andrew has a SenTec moisture probe on the farm. It takes readings to one meter depth and sends data via cellular every 15 minutes. Ten years of drought have left these guys with very little money to spare and loss of this year’s crop is heartbreaking.
Our last visit was to Chris Sharkey’s plots. Andrew is working with others to try some ripping, ripping and lime and ripping and compost trials on their sodic soils. Lime or compost is put down behind the ripper shank. The manure has given good results.
Overall a good but cold day. We did see more rocks than I have ever seen. A lot of back breaking work went into this land to get it farmable.
I am not sure if I will be able to get a blog out tomorrow. I will try to do a wrap-up in the next few days. We have had a great experience here, learned a lot and seen some very interesting farms and country side. Tim and Andrew of Precision Agriculture have been brillant.
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