Summer crops moving south

Traditionally dryland summer grains have generally only been grown in Northern NSW and Queensland (there have been irrigated summer crops grown in Southern NSW and Northern Victoria for a long time.)  With the advent of no-till, summer grain production is now possible (and somewhat beeneficial) in southern areas.Here are some links to three interesting articles that show other farmers who are trialing dryland summer cropsin Southern Australia. I have also included a link to a provocative article by WA agronomist, Wayne Smith: http://www.agronomy.com.au/PDF/WANTFA_No-till_talk_Feb_1999.pdf

Bruce Watson, Parkes, NSW

Schodde family, Murtoa, Vic   

Rural Property Management, Evansford, Vic

Summer Crops

After sowing spring crops in September, we left 700 acres fallow. Some was still too wet and generally it was just too late to keep sowing. More rain in November meant that it was still too wet to plant summer crops. The paddock below was planted early December on sorghum stubble. We managed to plant another paddock, but had to pull the pin on planting any more. So all up we got 180 acres of maize in.

Maize on Sorghum Stubble

My Brother planted some sunflowers in his garden (below). They have grown alright. I was going to put a paddock in, but it got too late. I think they will grow well here. Only three things worry me: birds, weeds and profitability. Apart from that they should be fine.

Sunflowers at Winnindoo

Spring Crops

You can see our rainfall (mm) for 2011 and early 2012 below. Basically we were ready to plant at the start of May and 12mm of rain pulled us up. We got going at the end of June and again in September. One paddock of canola sown early May yielded 2.5 t/ha. Those sown in June were much worse, mainly due to poor establishment due to slugs and wet weather. The September sown canola was similar to June sown with similar establishment problems. Wheat and Barley sown in September had similar establishment problems, some was near perfect and other paddocks were a complete disaster with rain soon after sowing causing seed burst, other paddocks missed the rain but suffered some slug damage.

Toongabbie rainfall, 2011-12

Apart from establishment difficulties the season was kind for spring crops. We had an exceptionally wet and cool November and December, with barely a day over 25 degrees. The wet weather combined with warm summer temperatures did bring some other problems, namely stem rust in the wheat and caterpillers in the barley. Canola was ready to windrow early January and harvest commenced later in January.

It was interesting to see longer season Gairdner barley outyield shorter season Hindmarsh. I assumed that a quicker maturity variety would be better as it would fill grain earlier when it is cooler. The Gairdner took it's time, tillered well and produced reasonable size heads. The hindmarsh just grew too quick and produced short heads without many tillers. I think that hindmarsh needs to grow in the winter to slow it down and produce a decent yield. Perhaps if the Hindmarsh was planted thicker it would have yielded better; we really need some trials on sowing rate and variety for spring sown crops. I've started a web page about spring cropping.

Sorghum Harvest

This post should have been done 6 months ago, but here goes anyway. Winter has been very wet, and we haven't been able to get on paddocks until September. We finished up sowing 2300 acres in early September to canola, barley and wheat. There was 270 acres sown to canola in June and 570 acres left fallow for summer crops. After the spring crops were sown we harvested the sorghum which has been ready for four months. The photo below is my brothers crop. The patch in front of the header is not representive of the paddock. A lot of stalks have fallen over and we've probably lost half the yield.

Gippsland Sorghum Harvest