Colin Dunne
Region: Duaringa, central Queensland
Commodity: Sorghum, corn, mung beans, chickpeas, wheat, organic beef cattle
Farming area: 2200 hectares for cropping, 60,000 for grazing
Rainfall: 250–1500 mm rainfall per year
Email: c_dunne@bigpond.com
Phone: 07 4935 7145
Responsive management to seasonal conditions is important for our business. The main climate-related decisions we make are weaning times, feeding breeders, stocking rates, row-spacing and double-cropping decisions. With farming, you can’t totally take the risk out of things. I try to just live with it, and deal with what I’m dealt, and do what I do best.
See what Colin has to say about:
- Farming for 50 years in central Queensland
- Watching a continually variable climate
- Managing extremes—frosts, heat, flooding—and their effects
- Being responsive to seasonal conditions
- Using and sharing climate information
Farming for 50 years in central Queensland
I live and farm about 20 kilometres north of Duaringa, on the Mackenzie River, in central Queensland. I have a dryland cropping and cattle grazing enterprise. I was brought up next door, where Dad lived, and we started farming there in the late 1960s. My family has had cattle since the 1870s.
We grow crops and can plant all year round. My main summer crops are mung beans, corn and sorghum. In winter, I grow chickpeas and wheat.
On the block where I live there’s about 12,000 hectares in all. I farm about 2200 hectares of that—the rest is for grazing and fattening cattle. We have 6 other cattle properties, totalling 52,000 hectares.
Our cattle operation is fully certified organic through the United States Department of Agriculture National Organic Program.
My lovely wife Catherine does our office work, my 2 sons work full time on the farms, my 2 daughters help out part time, and we have 3 full-time men.
Watching a continually variable climate
The rainfall at Duaringa varies between about 250 mm and 1500 mm.
In the 1950s, we got well over 1000 mm a year and in 2011 we’ve already had the same. But we have had some quite severe droughts too—in 2009 we had 20 mm over 6 months.
2011 is as cold a winter as we’ve had for quite some time. We’ve had several frosts this year. On our hot summer days it gets up to about 40°C.
Ever since I can remember, we’ve had the same variable climate—but changes are probably pretty hard to pick up just from what you remember. For instance, with crops, for a 10% difference in yield, you can’t see that difference until the header goes in.
The overall pattern of the extremes haven’t changed much, but the minimum temperatures for Emerald appear to be getting significantly warmer. I am keen to keep looking at these figures to see where they go.
I think that during winter, people are definitely getting a bit gamer with their planting dates and prepared to plant a bit earlier because heavy frosts don’t seem to occur as much.
I think that our ideas need to change over time to cater for the variation that might occur. Because it will occur. It always has, so it’s only going to keep happening.
Managing extremes—frosts, heat, flooding—and their effects
In terms of how we handle extremes, we probably push it more than most people around here.
I have gained from recent wetter years, and suffered in the drier years when I miss an odd crop. But if I’ve got seed in my silo, it’s not a big expense to put it in if there’s a chance you’ll get a good crop out of it.
Frosts
Frosts don’t worry me so much—whether you get one a year or half a dozen, it has the same effect really. Once the grass is burnt off from frost, it’s burnt off.
We plant our chickpeas around Anzac Day [25 April] to avoid the frost, otherwise we lose all our flowers. Chickpeas can come back after a frost if there’s moisture in the ground, but wheat won’t.
This year [2011] I planted earlier because the number of heavy frosts are generally declining, but in the past I probably wouldn’t have planted it as early as this. As the region’s climate gets warmer and frosts are not happening as much, we’re probably able to get away with planting a little bit earlier now, and use planting rain as in-crop rain.
Heat events
Certainly the cows don’t enjoy the heat, but at the end of the day, you just have to have the right breed of cattle to cope with it a bit better. Quite often that’s an animal with a shorter coat, such as a Brahman or Senepol.
Heat events can hurt my crops at flowering, especially summer crops such as corn or sorghum.
Flooding
Our river flats are a very heavy soil and very deep, good soil—at least 10 metres deep. Every 10 years, we get between 1 and 4 metres of water over our farming country. Luckily, we have no infrastructure that’s affected there. My cattle country is a bit lower. It probably gets 6–8 metres of water over it when that happens.
The flooding here last summer was quite big. The one before that was in 2008, only a couple of years previous. And then before that it was in 1991, which is unusual—from 1991 to 2008 is as long a spell as we’d usually get.
In early 2011, some of our paddocks got very wet so we couldn’t put all our summer crops in. We still had the wheat straw there from 2010, so I sowed chickpeas in. The chickpeas were excellent.
But we only had so much seed, so I had to plant some wheat. It didn’t do as well as I’d hoped because of zinc and nitrogen deficiencies—an after-effect of the flooding.
In retrospect, I should have put more chickpeas in rather than wheat. In another paddock where I had mung beans before the wheat, the wheat there is much better—it doesn’t show the effects of those deficiencies.
Being responsive to seasonal conditions
Responsive management to seasonal conditions is important for our business. The main climate-related decisions we make are weaning times, feeding breeders, stocking rates, row-spacing and double-cropping decisions.
With farming, you can’t totally take the risk out of things. Everything you do in farming is some sort of risk, but you certainly can’t let it put you off. I try to just live with it, and deal with what I’m dealt, and do what I do best.
Row-spacing
Trials suggest that 1.5 metre–wide rows give significant yield benefits over rows that are only 1 metre wide in a dry year, says Colin—and that’s what he does in marginal years.
Wider row-spacing is central to Colin’s moisture management in his summer crops. During grain-filling time, the crops will spread their roots sideways looking for water—especially sorghum.
“If I had planted another row of sorghum in the wide space in the middle, the crop would have used all the water up earlier. But with wide rows, at the time of grain-fill and flowering, the crops still have a reservoir of water left in the middle.”
Rotations
Climate outlooks have a certain influence on what we plant, but ideally I try and put legumes in all of the country and rotate them around.
But rain events have a big bearing on rotations too. Mung beans are very good to plant because you can harvest them before the wet and still plant another crop. Chickpeas are a lot slower.
I haven’t got a fixed rotation planned per paddock, but I try to share them all around, depending on seasonal conditions at the time.
Double-planting
I have harvested crops and double-planted a second crop following that to try to use an opportunity crop. If it rains, we get a good crop; but if I don’t get a second crop, I was pushing it to the limit.
It’s not all doom and gloom if an opportunity crop didn’t go as planned—a crop that didn’t do quite as well is useful as ground cover and to hold soil moisture for the next crop if there’s a heavy downpour.
If we have wheat in the silo, we might as well put it into the ground. We can then use planting rain as in-crop rain.
Using and sharing climate information
I enjoy reading the small climate section in the Country Life paper, because I get it weekly and it’s easy to read. I do go on the internet occasionally but I prefer the information to come to me.
But climate information is of interest and it is important because it affects all your decisions. If you could tell me whether I’m going to have a wet autumn or a dry autumn, I’d certainly make some big decisions based on that. I could decide what crop I’d be planting.
And if you knew the rain events that were going to hurt you at harvest, you could harvest, start it aerating and look after the grain.
It would also help us with the cattle—if a season was to stay dry I’d start feeding them protein in August. But if you knew it was going to rain, I’d let them hold over.
I would like to see more climate and weather data—we need to share it properly with each other. It should be put into the papers as well, for the farmers who don’t use the internet.
I’d also like to go through our local history to see what the trends are—to be in a better position to deal with them. I’m sure 99 per cent of farmers are working towards that anyway... As long as you have that information in front of you in case you have to act.
As forecasting becomes more reliable, I’m sure that people will trust those forecasts more. I feel as though people are saying more often now, ‘The weatherman’s getting pretty good now.' There are not many times that they’re far from the forecast.
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Interview date: 20 August 2011