Simon Wallwork

Region: Corrigin, Central Wheat Belt, Western Australia (230km east of Perth)

Commodity: grains and cattle

Farming area: 2200 hectares

Rainfall: 300-340 mm average rainfall per year

Phone: 08 90632505

Frost through this area is a massive cost to a lot of farmers. The problem is it happens at the end of the growing season, so you’ve put a fair bit on the line in terms of inputs. If you lose most of your production in one night, in one frost event, it’s just diabolical—financially and emotionally.

Simon Wallwork on his property at Corrigin, WA

See what Simon has to say about:

Agronomy
Farming in a low-rainfall region
Reducing the impact of frost
Learning to spread risk
No-till farming
Managing inputs and selecting crops based on soil type
Managing seasonal variability with sheep
Planning for the long term
Precision farming

Agronomy

When I’m not working on the farm, I work as an agronomy consultant, providing advice to farmers about crop rotations, nutrition, weed control, crop varieties etc. I help them plan their year and I answer any questions they have about the science behind growing crops and pastures. So that keeps me busy with some off-farm time and keeps me up to date with new farming techniques.

I’m also part of the local Corrigin Farm Improvement Group. We do trial work and try to improve our farming systems.

Farming in a low-rainfall region

Corrigin has a Mediterranean climate. We receive most of our rainfall in winter and we have hot, dry summers, although we’ve had some pretty wet summers in recent times.

The average rainfall is about 340 mm although on our lease, 25 km east of Corrigin, the rainfall drops to about 300 mm.

I’ve looked at some long-term rainfall figures and plotted trends and, in general, the seasons are getting drier.

I’ve also noticed that we’re not getting really well defined season breaks. The rainfall can be fairly sporadic and even late at times, so we have to manage that differently. We don’t always wait for the traditional 1-inch rainfall event before we start seeding. We might dry sow.

We’re getting very good at growing crops in soils with very little moisture and we are pushing them to their limits when they’re young.

In the past, we have almost killed barley and canola crops by sowing on 5–10 mm and not having any follow-up rain in the next 4–6 weeks. They didn’t die, so we’re finding out how far we can push that, and then when it does rain they just take off.

In some cases we think we’re better off having the crop in the ground, even if it’s struggling in the early stages. If you leave it all until that traditional 1-inch rainfall, it might be late May or early June. Then you’re really pushing hard to get your crop in good time.

I also believe that narrowing the sowing window down can increase your frost risk.

Reducing the impact of frost

Traditionally, locals in this area say frost hasn’t been a problem, but it varies a bit. Our farm west of Corrigin isn’t too bad as it sits a bit higher up on the landscape. There are patches that are susceptible but in general it’s not too much of a concern.

I think it depends on the history of your farm. Like on our other property out east, we’ve had a history of severe frost events in recent times so out there I only grow barley.

Barley does tend to be a bit more tolerant to frost than wheat. And if it does get frosted, you still get a reasonable yield. It might go from 2 tonne to 1 tonne whereas wheat might go to under 300 kg, which puts a bit of a floor on your production. That’s the main reason I got into cattle, to add a little bit more diversity to my business.

Frost is a really hard issue to manage because it’s such an unknown. The traditional approach is to delay sowing. But I’ve found no correlation with delayed sowing and frost damage. In fact some of my worst frost has been on my latest sown crops.

We grow a longer-season barley in general so we can sow early and make use of the moisture there and know it’s still flowering in a reasonable window.

Some of the information we had from the Managing Climate Variability program recently said that not only is the climate getting drier, the frost window is also opening up, which is a big concern. So we need to adapt to that somehow. And that’s where genetically modified breeding might be a really good fit for us.

Learning to spread risk

I’ve learnt a few hard lessons along the way.

In 2004, at our lease east of Corrigin, I dry sowed the same variety of wheat across a large area with a machine that’s capable of getting very even seeding depth. So when it eventually did rain this same wheat variety emerged at the same time across a wide area. However, when we got a frost, because every crop was at the same stage, every paddock got frosted and it was diabolical. It went from a 2-tonne potential to 300 kg, and that was half my program.

I learnt a big lesson from that – you don’t dry sow a big area like that and, if you do, you try and vary the seeding depth or vary the variety. I put all my eggs in one basket and that’s a big no-no in farming – you need to spread your risk. That’s probably one of the keys of being a good farmer.

Since then we’ve had some bad luck with frosts and dry seasons but I think you get better and better over time with experience. You can’t do anything about poor commodity prices or rising costs but you can apply inputs more efficiently and grow more grain with the same amount of moisture. We’re getting better at how we do it.

No-till farming

When no-till first arrived as an option for farmers, the uptake was slow. But as farmers watched other farmers and learnt the benefits of it, they began to adopt it.

We’re a no-till farming system. We use knife-points on our seeding equipment and do very little cultivation, if any. We put the crop in in one pass with very narrow points.

We try and keep all our residue from last year’s crop and we do very little burning, although we use a chaff cart to collect weed seeds out of the harvester and we burn those piles. We isolate the fire and we burn in piles so we can still keep the majority of the residue over the paddocks.

The idea is that we’re protecting the soil surface from erosion and we’re reducing evaporation and keeping more moisture in the ground.

I think most farmers nowadays are fairly comfortable with their no-till system and the next step may be disc machines. The Western Australian No-tillage Farmers Association (WANTFA) is doing research on disc machines so that may be the next step in terms of crop establishment and farming systems.

Managing inputs and selecting crops based on soil type

Recently we’ve been getting a contractor to do some soil surveys including EM38 (electromagnetic survey) and radiometric surveys.

Using a ute, the contractors tow the surveying gear, which is on a rubber mat, across a paddock. The instruments on the mat send a signal down into the ground which bounces back and, depending on which instrument they’re using, it tells you different things.

EM38 can tell you the conductivity of the soil, which is related to clay content. It can also be related to salinity so you need to ground-truth that.

The radiometric survey will show up thorium and potassium. The thorium gives you very good correlation with gravel and the potassium gives you good correlation with sand.

So you can get a very good idea of your soils’ characteristics and from there you can divide your paddocks up into different soil classes.

Once you’ve linked the soil classes into a GPS, you can be very accurate about when and where you turn on and off your inputs or change your rate with inputs.

It’s about $20/ha to get the surveys done and then you need yield-monitoring gear which most harvesters will have nowadays. I don’t think it’s hard to recoup that spending in terms of variable rate lime, as an example, which is quite expensive nowadays. Lime can be up to $60-70/ha. If the soil information tells you that only half the paddock needs lime, you can recoup the survey expense pretty quickly.

So it’s a process of trying to define the variability that exists in the paddock and using that knowledge to improve the efficiency of our inputs.

The surveys also offer information about your soils that you can use to then make decisions about crops, and you start finding relationships between crops and soil types. For example canola tends to prefer gravelly soils or medium soil types. It can be a lot harder to grow canola on heavy soil types or really light soil types.

Managing seasonal variability with sheep

I think sheep offer some really good diversity in your business to manage seasonal variability and perhaps in the future even climate variability.

I’m still trying to work out how I’m going to manage the sheep enterprise because it adds another level of complexity in the system. I’ll probably have to get someone else to help me out when my father-in-law eventually retires but at the moment he’s happy to do that.

With the sheep enterprise we’ve been sowing some lucerne. We sow it with our canola in a mix and we establish it underneath the canola in the last cropping phase of the cropping rotation. After the canola crop the paddock goes into pasture for 4¬-5 years.

The good thing about lucerne is, if we get summer rainfall, which the trends are showing we’ll get more of, then lucerne does very well out of those out-of-season rainfall events. And I think there’s potential for more of perennial-based pasture particularly in our animal enterprises as it gives you a little bit more flexibility for producing pasture out of season.

Sheep may not offer the potential income on a good year but their income seems to be more stable and perhaps a little less affected by climate. It just adds a bit of diversity to your income.

Planning for the long term

I think with farming, you really need to take a long-term approach to it. If you take it year by year, it’s hard to get your head around planning.

Over 20 years what sort of system will provide me with a decent income and a decent asset at the end of that time? To achieve that, you need to design a system that’s reducing the volatility of your income.

Not too many farmers would be making huge dollars on the short-term basis but at the end of your career if you’ve done it well without too much volatility you can build up some wealth to help the next generation and retire.

Precision farming

The problem with precision agriculture is that there have been lots of tools around but it’s been hard for people to really grab it and work out a real clear path with it.

Because I’m an agronomist I’ve been working out how to do it along the way with help from other colleagues. I think once the process becomes clearer it will catch on.

My seeding machine’s an older model but I’ve maintained it so I’ve managed to keep down the costs of getting into no till gear.

We’re moving towards controlled-traffic systems where we get all our wheel tracks lined up so we limit our compaction to just the wheel tracks across the paddock. That’s an ongoing process. We’ve got our boom spray lined up with our seeding equipment but we haven’t yet got our harvesters lined up with those. In time that will happen though.

We have auto steer on our tractor to 2 cm accuracy which allows us to increase our accuracy and also do things like get back into last year’s row or in between last year’s rows, depending on what we’re trying to achieve.

We got into auto steer about 5 years ago and it was more expensive than it is now, but that technology tends to get cheaper over time. And, again, it’s not hard to justify. Overlap alone costs us a fair bit every year so maybe in 2-3 years you pay for that equipment.

That’s what it’s all about - just slowly improving your farming system every year without going over the top with expenditure on machinery, because that has been the downfall of some farmers. You need to find that balancing act between having the gear that allows you do to the tasks you require without having the latest and greatest that’s just over-the-top expensive.