Bill Hunt
Region: ‘Nalang’, Bordertown, Upper South East region, South Australia
Commodity: Wheat, Durum wheat, milling oats, beans, oilseed, barley, canola, SAMM x Merino sheep for prime lambs
Farming area: 1000 hectares
Rainfall: 440–480 mm rainfall per year
Email: wdhunt@bigpond.com
Phone: 08 8752 0255
A big part of my program is to go with what happens and adapt to the year as it unfolds. We know that most of our rain’s going to get here in the winter time and we know the summers are going to be hot and dry. There’s not much we can do to change that.
What we can do is just go with whatever happens and fit that in to our operation. You always go with it. You can’t fight against it.
See what Bill has to say about:
- Using mixed farming to deal with climate variability
- Adapting to the year as it unfolds
- Using minimum tillage to maximise water-use efficiency
- Predicting the weather for the crucial part of the season
Using mixed farming to deal with climate variability
The climate here is a Mediterranean sort of a climate. We have warm to hot, dry summers and we have cool to mild, relatively damp winters. Although this year [2010] we’ve had a lot of summer rain.
Depending on which way you look at it, we’re either on the dry end of the high rainfall area or the wet end of the wheat/sheep dryland farming area.
We used to have a rainfall of 19-and-a-half inches a year, and in recent times it’s probably gone back to 17-and-a-half / 18 inches. Of course, at almost 24 inches (604 mm), 2010 has lifted the bar back up a bit.
1967, when I just started farming, was probably the driest year we’ve ever had, except for 1914. We had about 9 inches. Then in 1974 we had about 30 inches. They’re the extremes and all the rest of the years fall somewhere in the middle.
But it’s like everything; timing is everything. If we get that rain in the summertime it can be quite detrimental to our crop like it was this year (2010). Normally we don’t get a lot of summer rainfall but if we do we can end up with downgraded crops. When you’re trying to harvest it’s no good either.
So the rainfall for the year doesn’t always reflect whether it was a good or a bad year.
In this area there aren’t really any years where you get nothing. It’s a bit of a shock to the system when it’s cut right down but there’s never a time, like in some areas, where you get absolutely nothing and you have to try again next year.
We have about 1000 hectares and most times we make a pretty good living from it. We don’t irrigate. We rely completely on natural rainfall.
We have about 1250 Merino ewes. We’re growing durum wheat, milling oats, beans, a bit of oil seed, barley and canola, and bread wheat. And we make silage.
Adapting to the year as it unfolds
A big part of my program is to go with what happens and adapt to the year as it unfolds. We know that most of our rain’s going to get here in the winter time and we know the summers are going to be hot and dry. We can’t change that.
What we can do is just swing with it – go with whatever is happening and fit that in to our operation. You always go with it. If you fight against it you go broke.
Being flexible is really the art of what we do, I suppose. Being able to bend whichever way the season goes.
I suppose the key to the flexibility of the place and the operation is the balance between livestock and cropping acres.
The pasture is the driver of the enterprise because that sets the scene for all the crops and everything else that follows.
In a normal sort of year we would hope to get about 60% of our place under crop, and 40% under pasture.
But if a season gets a bad start with not much pasture around, we’d drop 2 or 3 cropping paddocks out. Then at the end of the year when harvest time comes, our pasture’s a bit thinner but better, and the crops are finer, more nutritious, more palatable. So our sheep go out there and we probably end up with 70% livestock and 30% crop.
That’s the way we do it, and it probably doesn’t sound very impressive and it probably doesn’t sound very smart, but it’s probably taken us 30 years to get it right.
Using minimum tillage to maximise water-use efficiency
One of the things that has made a huge difference to us is the adoption of minimum tillage or zero tillage. We’ve been doing it since about 1982. We were probably one of the first. Since then it’s just exploded.
At the time, I wanted to prove to someone that it wouldn’t work. So I tried it and, lo and behold, it did work! We’ve been working on it ever since.
It’s all about maximising water-use efficiency. Storing your rainfall in the soil whenever you get it and using it to your best advantage.
After the weeds come up at the break of the season, we spray them off and then the sheep clean them up through the autumn. Then we direct drill our crops in May and June.
We sell our lambs end of April, early May, and then towards the end of June we start getting new lambs. That way we are destocked through the toughest feed months. As the lambs get bigger and their feed demand goes up, the paddock feed keeps track of supply.
We put the lambs out on the bean stubbles over summer and then, come about the end of April, all the lambs start going off.
So it’s just a matter of swinging with the seasonal variability.
The changes in seeding technology have been exponential over the last 25 years. Every year there’s another weed-killing technique, another spraying technique, another different nozzle.
But if your seeding machinery costs you $250,000 or $300,000, you can’t afford to change the thing every year. And that’s an awful lot of money to have sitting there in the shed for 11 months of the year. That’s why we use a contractor for planting.
Predicting the weather for the crucial part of the season
We had 2 weeks of 100-degree heat in November 2009 and it absolutely fried everything. It caused an incredible amount of damage and cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But 2 years before that we had an absolutely terrible year and then, bang right on the death’s knock, on about the first week in November, we got about 150 points of rain, and everything just finished up fantastic.
And because everybody else was having a dog of a year, they never got much of a crop. But our crops held on just long enough and then – bang! And so we had really good crops. It was really, really good.
So you might have been able to predict the broad trend of that year right up until that hot week in November. You might have been able to predict the year before as a bad year up until that one and a half inches of rain.
But that anomaly that you get right at that crucial part of the season can make or break a season and I don’t believe that anybody can predict that anomalous finish with any degree of accuracy.
I’m looking at predictors at the moment, based very much on history and on moon cycles.
Lunar cycles don’t cause wets or drys; they’re an indicator of what way the season’s unfolding. Normally if you’re going to get a rain it’s going to come on the new moon.
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Interview date:18 May 2010