Andrew Carmichael
Region: Coolamon, New South Wales
Commodity: continuous cropping
Farming area: 423 hectares
Rainfall: 230-520 mm per year
Email: akcarmichael@bigpond.com
Phone: 02 6927 2949
The climatic predictions for this area are for higher temperatures, more wind, more-frequent frosts and more cloud-free days. Given how dry it has been here over the last 4 years, I’m convinced that the climate will also be drier.
Our farming decisions have been made to give us the best opportunity to produce a profitable crop, while avoiding a situation where we’re spending a lot of money producing a crop which we have no opportunity to harvest.
See what Andrew has to say about:
- Preparing our business for a drier climate
- Monitoring soil moisture during dry times
- Using second-hand, low-cost machinery to remain profitable
- Using press wheels to sow into drier soils
- Rotating field pea to minimise nitrogen use
Preparing our business for a drier climate
The federal government’s climate predictions for 2030, 2050 and 2070 in this area show that we will have higher temperatures, more wind, more-frequent frosts and more cloud-free days. Given how dry it has been here over the last 4 years, I’m convinced that the climate will also be drier.
We have had some extremely dry seasons. 2006 was a complete failure. In 2007 we had some hay and the crop was turned over to livestock for the balance. In 2008 we averaged 0.6 tonnes per hectare. And last year [2009] we averaged 1.3 tonnes per hectare.
To prepare for this drier climate, the questions in my mind are:
- What scale do we need to operate at to be viable in a drier environment?
- What amount of debt can our business sustain in a drier environment?
- What is the optimum enterprise mix? Should we be going down the path of all crop and no stock? Or is there a better mix of livestock and crop, to give us long-term financial sustainability?
- How should we approach our marketing, given volatility in grain pricing under a volatile climate scenario? Should we be actively marketing our grain over a 2-year period instead of a 3-month period?
- How do we even out very high production years and very low production years? We’ll need to think about how we store and market our grain, to try and capitalise on those years where we have no production but excellent prices.
Then there are the energy issues:
- What will it cost to run a farming plant 10/20/30 years down the track?
- How are we going to fund the energy costs of operating a broadacre farming plant given the likely scenario that oil is going to become extremely expensive? What are our alternatives?
Monitoring soil moisture during dry times
After spending the best part of two decades as an agronomist, and walking through crops that were magnificent, returning to farming in 2006 was hard. To plant a crop of wheat and have it totally fail was an enormous shock to my confidence. It just went to show how precious water is to a crop.
Watch a video where Andrew describes the shock of losing a crop to drought
With higher temperatures and a lack of rainfall, it is imperative that you retain as much moisture in your soil as you can. We retain our stubble to help with this and are about to invest in soil moisture monitors to keep track of how effective this strategy is, and how it may even be improved.
The soil moisture monitors that we are about to use are digital probes that are permanently fixed in the paddock. I won’t have one in every paddock, just one in every major soil type.
The data that we’ll collect will appear in a time-series graph, and I’ll be able to evaluate the effect of our water-retaining strategies, as well as rainfall, on the soil profile.
I’ll also be able to evaluate when my crop is accessing that moisture and at what point in the season.
The probes will go down 1.2 metres, which doesn’t quite go down to the maximum rooting depth. Wheat roots in this kind of environment will go down to 1.5 metres. So we’ll be measuring soil moisture down to 1.2 metres and downloading that data on a weekly or fortnightly basis.
These monitors will provide us with an evaluation tool and help us make those important mid-to-late-season decisions quicker; for example whether we should cut our crop for hay, as there will be little to no moisture left for it to yield well.
For me, anything we can do to increase our level of confidence in making decisions, particularly during dry periods, is a good thing.
Using second-hand, low-cost machinery to remain profitable
Our farming decisions have been made to give us the best opportunity to produce a profitable crop, while avoiding a situation where we’re spending a lot of money producing a crop that we have no opportunity to obtain.
My biggest decision is how to set up the business from a cost-structure point of view, so that I don’t have too much money invested in plant and equipment.
As much as the next bloke, I’d love to have new machinery. But at the moment, with the way the seasons have been, I don’t feel it’s justifiable. I’ve been forced into a situation where I have to run a second-hand, low-cost seeding unit.
I have a direct-drill combine which cost me $15,000 to put together. Two thirds of that cost is in the press wheels and the sowing boots.
In my view, you put the money where it really counts.
I’ve invested in things like press wheels, having accurate seed placement, low-drift nozzles on my boom spray to maximise spraying opportunities, and an auto-steer unit so I can spray at night and sow into stubbles.
My operation works out at a cost of about $22.60 per hectare or roughly $9.00 per tonne, assuming a crop yield of 2.5 tonnes per hectare.
So it’s very cheap, but it still allows me to do everything that a much more expensive seeding unit would allow me to do, as far as drill straight into stubbles and retain the stubbles we’ve got.
Using press wheels to sow into drier soils
Myself and others in my area have modified our seeders to install a press wheel behind each tine. The tine will shift the stubble and the soil to the side, creating a slot. The press wheel will follow, compressing the soil back to give you that seed-soil contact which you need for the seed to germinate.
This allows us to sow into situations where we would not normally be able to sow; for example, soils with marginal moisture levels.
The limitation is that if we have a year where there’s going to be significant stubble load, I’m going to have a problem. I will either have to upgrade my guidance system so I can inter row sow, or I will need to invest in a disc seeder, which will add a significant amount of money to my cost structure.
Rotating field peas to minimise nitrogen costs
In our first couple of years, we planted wheat and barley. After a few years there were paddocks that urgently required a break crop.
I’m always looking for the simplest straightforward system that I can implement that allows me to have good agronomic practices. So I introduced field peas to my rotations.
I selected field peas because I think it’s in our interests to minimise the amount of fertiliser nitrogen we’re applying, and a pulse provides an opportunity to do that.
Because of the mix of soil types on this farm, other pulses, such as lupins, weren’t suitable across all soil types.
The particular type of field pea I grow is a green split and I market that through a marketer who specialises in export container business. It means I have to pay a lot more attention to how I manage my crops quality.
I have to make sure there are no grub holes. I need to have a bright green product which means I need to desiccate the crop – dry it out – or they’ll start to look bleached.
There’s a lot of work involved with all that, but I believe that if you are going to grow a pulse, you should grow a pulse that is going to be profitable and go into a human consumption market.
I’m not sure if we will grow chick peas or lentils in the future but at the moment the system is very simple. It’s a field pea/wheat/wheat rotation.
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Interview date: 1 June 2010