So, its the start of April. April and May are critical months for us on the farm – so lets take stock of where we are.
We have had one of the most unusual late summer/early autumn periods in many years. Cool and wet. We have now had well over 300mm of our average yearly rainfall of 525 mm – all in the last 2 months. Which, although it brings problems of its own, has good potential for us. The problems relate to now sowing our seed over the next two months with machinery weighing up to 35 tonnes in wet paddocks.
As far as our preparedness, we are going ok. The machinery is just about ready to go. We have fertiliser and seed in place. Our chemical is ordered – I just have to pay for it all. Autumn is the time of truly impressive bills!!
So here are a few photos of what we have been up to….
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Spraying in Mud. The spraying program was a bit behind schedule due to all the wet weather in recent weeks. The old boom spray just gets coated in mud making some large ruts in places. In the end, the only way to get to some of the paddocks was to hire a plane to spray – So wednesday morning we had a plane swooping and diving over the wettest paddocks. Its expensive, but effective. |
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The main beneficiaries of the wet weather at the moment are the geese who are just in heaven. They plod from puddle to puddle. Its a hard life. |
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This is the little truck that could. I have a large rigid truck which carries our fetilizer to the paddock in sowing – but it needs to be seasonally registered to allow us to travel on the road. However, the regulations are that it must be unloaded when we get our pink slip – So where could we put the large heavy fertilizer grouper? On the little that that could – thats where!! The poor little truck had the bin balanced very carefully. That was an interesting morning. |
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And finally, sunsets. It really does look a picture out here. Beautiful sunsets. This image doesn’t really do it justice, but I’m sure you get the idea. |
Otherwise Dan and I went to a breakfast agronomy meeting for our farming group. It was very interesting looking at the chemical effects of fertiliser on seed germination, spray techniques and weed resistance issues. Sustainability of our farming practices into the future is a significant issue which we take very seriously and we spoke about that many times through the morning. I won’t bore you with details, but agriculture is a technical industry where alot of research is currently focused on. Its important to keep up to date.
And yesterday (friday) it rained again.
So thats it for the first week of April.
Thanks for reading the post and I hope all is well with you and yours.
NeilK