Another year has gone with a new one beginning. For our farming program, being dry land winter cropping farmers, the calendar year also marks our production cycles. We hope to finish harvest before Christmas, take a deep breath over the holidays and in the new year, embark on the next season.
Planning for the upcoming season kicks into gear and the unanswerable questions arise. The million dollar questions of how much will it rain and when will it rain during the year override any planning or budgeting that a farmer can do. Sure we can look at long term forecasts, but when forecasters struggle to predict rainfall a week away, forecasting 6-9 months out is highly unreliable. So in this respect, I’m afraid to say that the long term weather decision making tools available leave us in no better position than my grandfather was many years ago. And I must admit that after all of these years of my farming, I don’t find making the big decisions of what to do any easier. So my outlook is simple – I would prefer to look forward in faith and and make positive plans than to look forward in fear and plan for failure.
I only offer this comment to help give an insight into farming. I grew up with the reality that life on a farm was tough – anyone who has been on the land over the years will have been through droughts, fires and floods. And having seen so much of what can go wrong, farmers often voice doom and gloom in conversations at the church or the pub. John O’Brien’s poem with the famous starting line ‘”We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan’ captures accurately the banter of many people on the land. And, while we may chuckle about the poem, it is based on the harsh reality of life fully exposed to Australia’s variable climate.
So when I started farming, the responsibility to make decisions and deal with their consequences became mine. At that time, I was fortunate to receive some wise advice. And the advice was to look at a few farmers who were doing well and rather than finding excuses as to why their farms were doing better than mine (i.e., they were old farming families with money, or they were always lucky with rain, or their farm was in a better location, or their machinery was bigger or newer, etc, etc) – actually take the time and look at what they did. And when I did that, what I found was that in most cases, they just did things right. By that I mean, they did their farming in a timely and responsible fashion. They didn’t skimp on fertiliser. They sowed when it was sowing time, sprayed when it was spraying time and harvested when it was harvest time. They didn’t waste time scanning the sky, waiting for rain before they acted – they were too busy either preparing ahead of time for a job or actually doing the job on time. The bible has a verse “He who watches the wind will not sow and he who looks at the clouds will not reap.” I know it sounds simple – and I guess that in many respects it is. And that is what I try to do.
So January has been spent doing preparatory jobs. Many hours and significant costs in both fuel and chemical are expended on spraying to try and keep the paddocks clear of weeds in order to conserve moisture and nutrients for the coming winter crop. The late December rainfall and cool January conditions were ideal for weed growth and have provided a good opportunity to cleanup the paddocks.
We have also been spreading quite a lot of lime and gypsum this year as well. Calcium and sulphur are leached from the soil by rain over time, having a negative effect on the balance of the soil. Poor nutritional balance in the soil may show itself in a number of ways. Acidity, sodiciity, magnesium/calcium ratios are all terms which are used to describe conditions where the soil provides less than ideal conditions for crops to grow in.
So here are some pictures of our lime and gypsum application. Trucks, with pairs of rotating disks at the back, spread a stream of product – making truly impressive dust trails across our paddocks.
Making the decision to spread lime and gypsum can be a little difficult as the cost/benefit relationship is a bit fuzzy. What I mean by that is that with nitrogen or phosphorus fertilisers, there are established formulas which can be used to calculate the crop requirements and yield benefits from application. But with lime and gypsum, benefits will only show over a number of years and is very hard to quantify the actual benefits in a dollar value to justify the cost.
Never the less, we believe that adding such soil conditioners such as lime and gypsum have long term benefits for the soil’s health and as such we try and regularly try and include it in our expenditure.
As we head into February and March, our attention becomes drawn into preparing our equipment and paddocks, cleaning our seed, getting fertiliser on hand – all so we are ready to sow again in April.
And I guess, from where I started with this blog site in 2014 – this post completes a year’s farming cycle. I had started the project with the aim of documenting a year on the farm and I guess I have achieved that goal. Thank you to all who have taken the time to read the posts and for all of the kind comments received.
Cheers
Neil Kingham