Heavy rain and flooding in early summer might have caused havoc for harvesting winter crops, but they appear to have positioned fifth-generation Boggabri farmer Andrew Watson for a successful summer cropping season.
"We had a lot of rain early in the season and some cooler temperatures, but that hasn't necessarily caused too much harm to the summer crops that didn't get flooded," he said. "The cotton held a lot of fruit on the bush and is filling now and the sorghum and corn, both those crops really benefited from all the rain."
Mr Watson and his wife, Heike, farm 3600 hectares at Kilmarnock and Merriendi, east and north of Boggabri.
They grow irrigated and dryland winter cereal and oil seed crops and summer crops, and run a grazing operation as a cooperative with a number of neighbours on about 770ha of native and improved pastures.
Soil types are chiefly clay vertosol, which are dark, heavy, cracking clays, but there are also harder setting red clay loams and some permeable sand lenses. Soils are mostly neutral to slightly alkaline with a pH of 7.5-7.8.
Average annual rainfall of 593 millimetres is supplemented with furrow and overhead irrigation sourced from the Namoi River and several bores.
Mr Watson is a keen student of improving water use efficiency - research into the topic took him overseas on a Nuffield Scholarship in 2006 - and has worked hard to reduce water consumption by crops and cut operational losses.
Moving to lateral and pivot irrigators helped improve the efficiency of water application, but not channel losses.
That's driven a program of relining dams and channels with clay or bentonite, which swells markedly in water and stops it percolating deeper in the profile.
Also in cropping:
Guided by EM38 surveys to identify soil types in dams, clay is taken from one area and laid over the top of porous sand lenses. In the first 12 years, there was a 66 per cent increase in average yields, using the same volume of water.
"We've certainly recorded a difference," Mr Watson said. "Whether or not it stays stable over time is a question we've still got. And we're trialling some low pressure drip irrigation this year in cotton, which looks like it's going to save some water, but whether that's cost effective is another question."
Last year's crops were Westcourt and DBA Bindaroi durum wheat, Victory 75-03CL and Pioneer 44Y90CL canola, and PBA Drummond and Seamer chickpeas.
Harvest was delayed by rain and flooding in November - the monthly tally of 202mm was the second highest in 137 years - and more rain in December. They were still harvesting wheat and chickpeas in January.
"We lost 200ha of dryland cotton to flooding and 130ha of durum wheat," Mr Watson said. "Most of the rest of the winter crop was severely downgraded in quality and yield."
Irrigated summer crops are 600ha of Sicot 746BRF and Sicot 748BRF cotton, 80ha of Pioneer 1756 corn and there's 200ha of dryland Cracka sorghum which is due to be harvested this week.
Preparation for the sorghum began by spraying a long fallow paddock of wheat stubble with Atrazine and Starane at label rates.
The Cracka sorghum was zero-till sown from September 15 with a John Deere 1730 precision planter at 38,000 seeds a hectare single skip on one metre row spacings. The seed comes with a coating of Gaucho to guard against damage from ground dwelling insects, such as wireworm, and the crop received a single spray of Vivus biopesticide on December 31 to protect it from heliothis.
"And that's it," Mr Watson said. "It's an amazing crop to grow in some ways. We have a long term program of putting chicken manure on about a four year rotation. It tends to leave a lot of residual nitrogen that's slow released. That crop hasn't had any nitrogen, but it's still growing a pretty nice, strong crop."
The sorghum crop was sprayed with glyphosate to encourage desiccation on February 12. Yields are expected to range from 2.5t/ha to 5t/ha.
Mr Watson said he opted for Cracka after it demonstrated resilience in variety trials on his farm.
"In really dry years, it's easily outperformed other varieties," he said. "In wetter years it's been at least equivalent, so it's a variety we really like, and it suits our program."
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