New plant cuts the mustard

The plant is an initiative of Australian Agricultural Technologies, which needs farmers to plant 8000 hectares of mustard this year for construction of the multi-million dollar plant to be viable.

Australian Agricultural Technologies (AAT) chief executive Daryl Young said the company had secured about 50 per cent of the required plant.

He said AAT had until the end of March to secure the other half as farmers generally planted on Anzac Day.

“We’ve got the seed available from our trials so it’s just a matter of getting the area and then we can put the processing plant in,” Mr Young said.

The University of Sydney, Department of Primary Industries and CSIRO did more than nine years of breeding trials, planting mustard varieties from Coolamon to Coonamble to ensure the crop could produce.

Varieties called muscons, which the company says have higher yields than canola in drier seasons, are more frost tolerant and finish up to two weeks earlier than canola.

“The demand (for mustard) is strong and there are no issues with markets,” Mr Young said.

“It’s a supply issue.”

Mr Young said farmers might only want to put in a small trial crop of mustard this year, but he encouraged them to do so.

“We know in the east... mustard will be 10pc lower in yield than the hybrid varieties of canola, but we’ll be paying a premium on canola prices if you lock them in.

“We also have hectare contracts on offer.”

He said from an economic point of view there were water efficiency benefits.

“In the dry it’s going to finish better than canola,” Mr Young said.

“It also finishes two weeks earlier than the canola we’ve had in the trials.”

Mr Young said if farmers had more than 550 millimetres of rain they’d be behind in yield with mustard, but “in a tighter year they’d be up to 50pc better”.

“If you are going to plant 500ha, then put 50ha (of mustard) in and have a go.”

Landmark agronomist Graham Falconer, Forbes, said the region had grown mustard on and off since the early 1980s.

He said one of the problems in growing mustard was there was no reliable market, despite the demand, and he hoped the plant would change that.

He said the mustard seed for farmers who want to take part in the new initiative was developed by the University of Sydney and selected by the CSIRO. It is different to the seed used in the 1980s.

“It performed very well in trials, and beats canola in a dry year by 40pc,” Mr Falconer said.

“However, in a wet year it’s the other way round.”

He said because of its ability to grow in drier seasons it would be “very suited” to paddocks west of Forbes.

Farmers who hadn’t planted canola due to lower subsoil moisture and who were instead looking at barley or wheat had a viable alternative in mustard, with a lower risk of failure.

Mr Falconer said mustard was better at biofumigation than canola and, as such, would make a good rotation crop for farmers.

“It’s a better rotational crop than canola because of its soil fumigation properties, especially for crown rot, which is the major destroyer of wheat,” he said.

Mr Falconer said if he was growing canola this season he’d plant one quarter of the cropped area to mustard and the rest to canola.

“I’d be looking at getting 1.6 tonnes a hectare for mustard and 1.2t/ha for canola in a dry-ish season,” he said.

The main problem with growing mustard was that it wasn’t yet triazine tolerant, although Mr Falconer said it would be developed.

The main concerns for farmers considering growing it would be to ensure the country they were going to grow it in was “clean”, he said.