The coming season is already bringing new challenges for fifth-generation Alectown farmer Neil Westcott, who expects it to be a high-risk, high-return year, given skyrocketing input prices and potential delays or shortages.
"I feel like I'm behind because of our late harvest," he said. "I did have a lime program that I was hoping to get done. But every day that passes means I may not have time to get that done and getting product at the moment is a little bit hard. That's going to be the big thing: to make sure we've got fertiliser, chemical and seed ready to go come mid-April."
Mr Westcott farms with his wife Alison and son Hayden in the Alectown district, north of Parkes. They grow 2100 hectares of dryland winter cereal and oilseed crops, and 80ha of field peas each year for a local buyer.
The Westcott properties have a variety of soil types, from sandy red loam in the west to highly variable soils closer to the Hervey Ranges in the east. These range from heavy self-mulching types through to gravel on the ridges.
Annual soil tests are important for ensuring crops receive sufficient nutrients and a program of regular liming helps keep pH in the 5.5-6 range. The standard rotation for the past 25 years has been canola, wheat, barley, which Mr Westcott said provided enough of a weed and disease break.
"Keeping the nitrogen levels up is probably the main weakness," he said. "It'd be lovely to have a legume that was reliable and profitable, so you could replace some of the canola, but up till now it's been more profitable to buy and apply nitrogen to the crop."
Last year's crops were Lancer and Flanker wheat, RGT Planet and La Trobe barley, Nuseed GT-53 canola and Morgan field peas.
Preparation for the 600ha of canola began with using a Yeomans Plow to deep rip paddocks of barley stubble over summer. After 25 years of using a New Holland Trash Farmer he "bit the bullet" last year and bought a new 12m Horsch Sprinter seeder bar with knife points and press wheels, equipped with coulters and a 12,000L three-bin air cart.
Starting April 20, the canola was sown on 254mm row spacings at a seeding rate of 2kg/ha with monoammonium phosphate (MAP) at 60kg/ha and urea at 80kg/ha. Two applications of glyphosate kept weeds in the Roundup Ready hybrid largely under control, and crop competition - it reached almost 2m in places - took care of most late-germinating ryegrass. The crop was top dressed with urea at 100kg/ha by plane in August and received one aerial application of Prosaro at 450ml/ha to protect against sclerotinia in early September. Harvest began with direct heading the canola in mid-November, and at the same time down came the rain. Mr Westcott said they toiled away with two headers on and off for 20 days to bring in the crop, which averaged 2.9t/ha and 46 per cent oil content.
"It took quite a while," he said. "But it was a nice job to have yields like that coming in. There are plenty of smaller blocks that went more than 2.9t/ha, but to average that over the whole farm was amazing."
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He said in his 40 years of farming he'd never before achieved 2.5t/ha from canola in one paddock, let alone averaged it.
"It was nice to actually pocket that one and be able to say I've finally done it," he said. "Financially, it was one of the best harvests we've ever had ... even though we did lose a lot through downgrading in both yield and price in the cereals."
This year also looks like setting new records. Mr Westcott said it was daunting to have to find $120,000 to fill an 80-tonne silo with MAP. By his calculations, the cereal crops would have to yield 3t/ha just to break even.
"It really is amazing how you finally start to see prices for the products you grow get to a point where they should be, and then all your input costs just get hiked," he said.
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