It takes a lot of feeding, but the effort to get a corn crop up at Hillston is paying big dividends for the Peters family, Ballatherie Co., at Hillston.
The family has planted 90 hectares of 1488 Pioneer variety corn on its 36,000 hectare holding, The Lea, where they run 7000 Merino ewes.
Summer storms have been hit and miss, bringing some patchy rain to about a quarter of the property.
Meanwhile, Andrew Peters has been busy making sure the corn crop is a success, with planting on October 26 last year. He is due to harvest in March.
The crop took a lot to get up and running with watering every eight hours to start with (from bore water sources). He has now cut that back to every seven days.
The crop, which is just coming into flower, uses about 10 or 11 megalitres a hectare, and had 500 to 600 kilograms of urea a hectare applied. The Peters expect the corn should yield 12t/ha to 14t/ha.
Mr Peters rates corn as top feed for sheep, and the feed it produces to last 12 months. “We put it out to the sheep in self feeders,” he said.
With corn commanding $400/t to 500/t, and then freight, he’s saving half his feed costs just by planting a crop.
The crop was planted on black soil floodplain country and watered through bankless channels, the bore water being of good quality.
We’ve had a couple of good seasons not too long ago and you just have to gear yourself up to survive the bad ones.
“You have to defy these seasons. We’ve had a couple of good seasons not too long ago and you just have to gear yourself up to survive the bad ones. We were destined for a dry run and you can’t dwell on the drought too much,” he said.
Pigs were not a problem as the Peters: Andrew, Mark and father Geoff, kept on top of the problem.
“We’re ready for them,” Andrew said. The nearby creek had run dry and he was expecting they had moved further away.
“You just have to keep on top of them and they are okay.”
They also run Ballatherie Poll Merino stud, which had a successful on-farm sale last September, with buyers paying up to $3300 for 115 of the 120 rams offered.