Bill Yates
Region: Garah, north-east New South Wales (480 km south-west of Brisbane)
Commodity: Wheat, barley, canola, lambs, hay
Farming area: 12,000 hectares
Rainfall: 175-1050 mm per year, average 540 mm
Email: yatesbill@bigpond.com
Phone: 02 6754 3389
We’ve noticed that we don’t really have spring now. We seem to go straight from winter to 30 degrees, and that could happen over a week. I live and die by the climate and weather. At times it’s a matter of calling it early, especially if you think you’ve got to quit stock or turn sheep out on a crop.
See what Bill has to say about:
Mixing cropping and livestock
My grandfather started here in 1899, just after the railway came to Moree. This land was up for ballot and William Thomas Yates was the lucky man. He had to show some money and some sheep, and he had to clear the land. I came back here in 1972 after gaining a Master of Rural Science degree and helped my father.
When my wife Anne and I married and my son Andrew was born, we bought ‘Amondale’, which is next to my grandfather’s original property ‘Delvin’. Since then we bought to the west and then an adjoining property. Andrew runs the farming side of things now; I do the stock. My wife is a qualified psychologist – she keeps me on the straight and narrow when the climate’s getting to me. Our daughter Michelle is doing a PhD looking at what effect increasing temperature has on aphids and how natural predators, such as wasps, control them.
The farm is savanna woodland and is nearly all floodplain. Once the water gets over the bank of a shallow creek it just spreads for miles, up to 20 kilometres wide and 80 kilometres long, and eventually it trickles into the McIntyre or the Balwyn River. The overland floods fill our soil with water, and that’s how we grow our crops.
It’s a mixed farm. We crop about half of the property – about 8000 hectares. We crop wheat, barley, faba beans and chick peas. Our summer crop is sorghum. We grow some grazing crops as well – vetch and sometimes other legumes.
We run about 500 breeding cows and 4000 ewes. We sell the calves off at any age, either direct to slaughter or to feedlots to fatten up and grow out to domestic requirements. We mainly use the sheep for meat production now, rather than wool.
Climate changes on our farm: no spring and fewer frosts
Our typical season is a wet summer. In a good year we get 50 to 60 mm rainfall in January and February, and about 130 mm over winter. September/October/November can be quite variable.
We’ve noticed that we don’t really have spring now. We seem to go straight from winter to 30°C, and that could happen over a week. We’ve also noticed the climate getting warmer here, so we sow earlier.
The risk of frost damage has dropped. Typically we get about 40 light frosts a winter, but it can get down to -12°C on the ground. We haven’t seen frosts like that for a few years, but one of these days we’ll get nailed by an outlier.
We also went through a period up until 4 years ago where we didn’t get much rain in summer. When that happens, it really reduces our potential for a winter crop and for next summer’s crop.
Changing our sowing times as the climate warms
With the warmer climate, the season’s getting shorter for wheat. The sowing window is from mid April to late May, whereas it used to go to late June.
Sometimes we get 30°C in mid-August and that knocks winter cereals around. We have to start early and grow a short winter crop.
If we miss that window, we grow a summer crop rather than sowing a wheat crop in July. You need a bed of deep moisture to grow sorghum because the roots can extend to a depth of 1.5 metres. We use some tricks to save the moisture for when it’s flowering. We plant a skip-row configuration – sowing two rows and then skipping one – which means there is some moisture available in the skip row for when the plant is flowering.
Increasing yields and growing summer crops
In the beginning, farming was too easy; this country was new and very fertile. A lot of it didn’t develop until the 1970s and ’80s, and farms got away with some pretty ordinary practices. Burning, for instance, which wasn’t good for moisture conservation. Then problems came and we had to get smarter.
Today our farming strategy is based on an increased reliance on crops, preserving water by using zero till and stubble retention.
I balance risk by using a mixture of crops and grazing.
No-till allows us to store more moisture over the fallow, allowing timely weed control. The use of depth wheels, narrow points and press wheels enables the best plant establishment. Rotating our crops looks after the health of our soils, minimises disease build up and helps with weed control.
The proportion of summer crops has been increasing as we’ve got more confident that we can grow them. Ten years ago we couldn’t grow the yields we’re getting now, and it’s because of better practices, not new varieties.
And as we’ve acquired more land, we’ve improved our management systems as well. I live and die by the climate and weather. At times it’s a matter of calling it early, especially if you think you’ve got to quit stock or turn sheep out on a crop.
No-till farming has increased moisture and our cultivation area
The farm has changed over the years. By using a no-till approach, we’ve increased our cultivation area from 2000 acres to 20,000 acres in 10 years [from about 800 to 8000 hectares].
No-till uses crop residue to preserve the moisture and to stop the surface drying out, and gives you more sowing opportunities. For instance, this year [2010] it hadn’t rained since the beginning of March and we started sowing in mid April. No-till enabled us to do that because we could sow deeper into the moisture bed.
Before no-till, we used to control weeds with a plough by burying, cutting, or lifting them out. In a wet season we couldn’t do that before the moisture was taken up by the weeds because the fields were untrafficable. Now, moisture conservation is much more feasible because if the ground is too wet we’ll put a plane over it.
Our shift to no-till in the 1980s was incremental – I didn’t instantly see it as the solution. And the machinery was fragile. Our soils are pretty rugged so the gear had to be adapted. Now, we just go in and sow. With better machinery you can sow through a lot of straw.
Rotating crops to save moisture and stop disease
When we started off we had winter weeds that we couldn’t control and we didn’t know about rotation crops. We had terrible trouble with diseases, weeds, wild oats and phalaris. We realised that the only feasible method to manage diseases and weeds in a no-till system was to grow rotation crops.
An expert in the US told me that I could save 20–30% moisture, but added: “it won’t give you extra yield unless you stop the disease build-up.”
Our typical rotation is chick peas, wheat, barley, then back to chick peas. In paddocks that have been farmed for 50 years, we might use faba beans because they add more nitrogen to the soil, even if yields and returns are lower. The legume phase knocks a lot of diseases out.
Deciding what to plant
The first half an hour of my day is spent on the internet. I get an idea of whether it’s going to rain next week or the week after, or in 3 days’ time.
I go to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the European climate model, and then into WX maps for their interpretations. I also look at the Bureau of Meteorology. Then Anne and I have a 2-pots-of-tea discussion.
During autumn, we decide how much barley to plant. We make a matrix up according to how much moisture we have – the high, medium and low moisture in the soil – and cross that with our view of the autumn, winter and spring rainfall from El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole.
The moisture and rainfall sway our decision on how our crop will handle it. If it looks like being wet, we’ll plant faba beans instead of chickpeas. But if the outlook is for a dry winter/spring, we’ll probably go mainly with barley.
If the outlook is for an average winter, we’ll plant mostly wheat, followed by barley, then chickpeas.
All you need for chick peas is a couple of feet of stored moisture.
Barley has a very aggressive root system which needs little rainfall to extract moisture from the full depth of the soil profile. It is a good option when subsoil moisture is good and an early sowing is available, given that our focus is on malting barley.
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Interview date: 31 August 2010