Krysteen McElroy
Region: Padthaway, South East region, South Australia
Commodity: Grapes, broadacre cropping, small-seed crops, livestock, beans, wheat, canola
Farming area: 500 hectares
Rainfall: 400–550 mm rainfall per year
Email: bkmcelroy@bigpond.com
Phone: 0408 65 5108
With the water table dropping, our decision to upgrade the surface irrigation system to a surge irrigation system was of utmost importance. It’s been a big expensive, time-consuming exercise. But it’s been one of our huge successes. We have renewed enthusiasm for irrigation.
See what Krysteen has to say about:
- Using mixed farming to deal with climate variability
- Farming in temperature extremes
- Increasing irrigation efficiency
- Retaining soil moisture
- Monitoring local weather trends
- Using weather-forecasting, crop-modelling and decision-support tools
- Learning from other farmers
Using mixed farming to deal with climate variability
My husband Bradley’s parents started on this property about 40 years ago and we’ve been here, running the farm with them, for more than 20 years.
We have vineyards, broadacre cropping, small seeds (lucerne, phalaris) and livestock (sheep, lambs and cattle).
Mixed farming means we can swap and change our enterprises to suit how weather and prices are going. We can increase the number of paddocks we plant if cropping is going well, or increase our stock numbers if cropping is not so good. It gives us a bit of flexibility.
But mixed farming can be difficult because each enterprise has got its busy time of the year and having a mixed system makes us extra busy. But that’s okay – you learn to manage that and juggle everything into some sort of balance.
Farming in temperature extremes
Some people you talk to about climate change ridicule it and say it’s not happening. Whether you believe it is or it isn’t is a personal choice, but we still have to deal with the variability.
Extremes of temperature are our main concern here, especially when the crops are flowering. Mostly it’s frost in the spring and heatwaves in summer.
Frost can destroy the new season’s shoots on our vines and crops. We have put in sprinklers to protect our vines from frost. They turn on when the air temperature reaches 2 or 3°C. The sprinklers rotate around the vineyard and the water they spray stops frost settling on the vines. Frost sprinklers are quite a big investment, but more and more people are going that way. They’ve worked for us.
Heatwaves shut down vine growth and can ‘sunburn’ the berries. Crops literally cook when there’s a heatwave – the grain can taste like it’s been toasted.
When we hear on the radio that researchers are trialling drought-resistant wheat or frost-tolerant wheat, that’s exciting for us. It helps us manage what we can’t control.
Krysteen discusses weather extremes
Increasing irrigation efficiency
In Padthaway, we have an underground water supply. We use surface irrigation on the small seeds and drip irrigation in the vineyard.
Two years ago the water table dropped significantly, and so did our pumping rate. We were putting out 500 kilolitres an hour through our pumps, and in 2 years that suddenly dropped back to 160 kilolitres an hour. So we had to look at the best way to use the water we could extract.
We had a study done by the NRM Board and discovered the best option was to improve what we were already doing, upgrading the surface irrigation system to a surge irrigation system and increasing our channel holding area.
We used to pump the water into the channel and if the gate was open the water would go straight into the hectare-sized bay. It was taking about 10 hours to water a bay, which was inefficient in diesel usage and power usage.
With the surge irrigation system, we can now water a bay in an hour and a half, so there’s less pumping time. And our pumps can have some time off.
We fill up the channel. Once it’s full – we now have sensors and automatic gates – it releases the gate and waters that bay. Then the gate shuts again, the channel fills up and it moves on to the next bay.
And each bay’s got its own check bank to keep the water contained. It doesn’t wild flood which is what some people think surface irrigating is. It’s all very controlled and very efficiently done.
The decision to upgrade the surface irrigation system to a surge irrigation system was of utmost importance. It’s been a big expensive, time-consuming exercise. But it’s been one of our huge successes. We have renewed enthusiasm for irrigation.
If we’d left it how it was, we couldn’t have watered the necessary hectares – it was too inefficient. We are now able to irrigate the area required for maximum production.
We thought we were doing it okay before, but now we can see that we weren’t really. It’s exciting and motivating.
Retaining soil moisture
The South East is officially classed as a high rainfall zone, and we used to have plenty of rain here but we haven’t seen that for a long time – 10 years or so. This means we have to work on keeping what moisture we can.
One way we’re increasing our water efficiency in the irrigated areas is with plant management. We are spraying to remove the perennial plants between rows to allow the water to flow through quicker. Before, the thick grass used to hold up the irrigation water.
We’ve also compacted the base of our irrigation channel to reduce seepage. So, again, that’s saving water.
With the watering of the phalaris we used to have about a 10-day rotation. After 10 days, we’d start the pumps again. Now we’re using more soil-moisture monitoring equipment, and sometimes it’ll be 6 days we need to water, and sometimes it can be out to 12. So we’re listening to more what the plant’s telling us.
And our yields [in 2010] were 200 kgs above what they generally are, and above the district average too which is really nice. Bradley puts it down to the plant roots not being waterlogged so much. All our bays are laser-levelled and have a bit of a fall on them so the water drains off quickly.
Another win for plant water-use efficiency here was in 2006 – the crops we sowed using a DBS [deep blade system] really stood out. That method retains more moisture in the soil, and it made a huge difference.
We also look at different methods of planting to retain our stubble. We’re trying to retain more and more stubble every year to save moisture.
Monitoring local weather trends
Keeping accurate records of events and readings throughout the irrigating season is one of the most important things we do each season.
We record every irrigation event, pumping rate, rainfall, and anything else that can have an effect on our outcomes.
For example, with the broadacre cropping, we try to make the right decision at the time. Keeping track of rainfall and irrigation has proved very useful and has been a good base to look at trends and results over the years. This is simple but it works for us!
Using weather-forecasting, crop-modelling and decision-support tools
My husband Bradley uses the Elders website for weather information because it’s easy to access and easy to understand and read. It gives him wind and temperature readings for the current day, as well as projected forecasts for the coming week, so he can plan his work around that.
Farmers are interested in seeing new crop-modelling and climate-decision tools first-hand (such as APSIM) when they become available. Then we can evaluate how it might fit into our decision-making. Some research that comes out is quite involved and the reading you have to do to remain up to date can be heavy going.
Tools need to be in a form that is simple, easily understood, and relevant, such as Yield Prophet®.
Learning from other farmers
We’re always looking at new ways to manage our enterprises and seeing how other people do it so we can implement similar changes here if they are suitable. Even if you pick up one new way to manage frost from someone else, for example, it’s worth it because that one thing could make a huge difference.
I’m also the Executive Officer for a grower group in the South East called the MacKillop Farm Management Group. It covers farmers from Keith in the Upper South East, to Millicent and western Victoria in the Lower South East.
We organise workshops and act as a portal for researchers and other bodies to get new and relevant information out to farmers and agribusiness in our region. Our main focus is trials of new varieties, agronomy issues, and new and innovative ways of farming.
As part of my involvement in the MacKillop Group, we organised a study tour up to Dalby and Moree last year. We went with a group of 24 farmers. Because everyone could relax with each other and talk, we learnt a lot from people in our own region as well as from the properties we were lucky enough to visit.
Date of interview: 17 May 2010
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