Thirsty crops at Binginbar

But another 200mm is required on the 1800 hectares of crop to significantly salvage any sort of grain yield, according to Nathan Simpson.

“We need 100 mils at least just to have enough crop to graze, let alone run through to harvest,” he said.

However Mr Simpson said he was very excited after last weekend’s falls of 33mm to 41mm over the family aggregation operated with his parents, Ross and Michele, and brother, Kieran.

“This could be a starting point,” he said.

When it came to cropping, the Simpsons have been primarily grain-growers. But that was  only up to recently.

“We undertook a benchmarking process with a benchmarking group,” Mr Simpson said.

“We found that year-in and year-out our gross margins were better as a grazing enterprise and we are gradually working towards that.”

The family changed to growing dual-purpose crops.

“These grazing crops have put our gross margins up by hundreds of dollars per hectare,” he said.

“So that was the trigger-point for us to change from growing straight grain, except for canola, which is still an integral part of our rotations.”

They are however, changing canola to dual-purpose as well with 100ha planted to the new Victory 7001 variety on March 20 this year.

Also in the ground and up is 355ha of Uambie dual-purpose barley and 225ha of kittyhawke grazing wheat.

“There is also 600ha of straight pasture of lucerne, phalaris and three clover varieties and the remainer has been put down to Gregory wheat for a grain return,” Mr Simpson said.

“The Gregory acreage was originally intended for canola, but we missed the sowing window because there was no moisture.”

With the dry, grazing was cut short on all crops this season.

“Normally we’d get eight to 10 weeks grazing, but this year it was down to three to four weeks,” Mr Simpson said.

“In normal years we work on 30 dry sheep equivalent (DSE) per hectare, whereas this year we were back to 20 DSE and half the grazing time.”

This year the Simpsons grazed all dual-purpose paddocks except two, which they were keeping solely for grain.

Grazing is now an integral part of the family’s prime lamb production with 36,000 head turned off as heavy trade in the past 14 months.

PLANNING for fodder to run the large prime lamb feeding operation at “Binginbar”, Gollan, through to the 2019 harvest is well underway, says Nathan Simpson.

Already the family enterprise which crops (dual-purpose) more than 1800 hectares and fattens upwards of 36,000 prime lambs during a 14 month trading year has used most of the 4000 tonnes of fodder reserved from previous harvests.

Not unlike other well-managed farming businesses, the Binginbar Farms future plans include negotiating through the barriers nature has placed this year.

“By the end of October 2017 we had 2600t of silage on-farm and now that’s down to 200t,” Mr Simpson said.

“We would have used close to 1200t of grain in that same period including 400t of wheat and 600t of barley.”

The Simpsons bought 1000t of grain a fortnight ago which they hope will get them through until January.

“I’m hoping that by the end of November/December we can harvest something ourselves if we get the required breaks,” he said.

“But hopefully Victorian and South Australian producers gain enough rain on crops to ease the pressure on prices so we can then buy more grain to go through until the 2019 harvest.

“We are currently negotiating with South Australian producers to secure 2000t of hay which will see us through to harvest in 2019.”

In the meantime, the Simpsons have installed a soil moisture probe system, John Deere Field Connect (pictured above with Nathan Simpson) of three probes and a gateway on a sloping 100ha paddock which has three soil types.

Mr Simpson said the trial should identify and explain the varying grain yields in the soil types.

“We suspect the lower yields in the better, but lower soil, are due to frost, and this trial should hopefully pinpoint this.”

Meters show two-thirds of rain moisture this season has been ineffective.