WHEN Riverland farmer Craig Duffield undertook a Nuffield scholarship last year, his aim was to find a way to increase profitability and sustainability while farming in a low-rainfall area.
Craig and his wife Nicole are based at Ramco, an area beyond Goyder's Line, which has an average growing-season rainfall of 180 millimetres. They crop 2000 hectares, focusing on wheat, barley, rye and triticale.
Craig travelled to the UK, eastern Europe, the United States and Canada as a Nuffield scholar in 2010.
One of his chief goals was to visit the property of American farmer Rick Beiber, who had been a guest speaker at a SANTFA conference in 2009.
"At the SANTFA conference, Rick spoke to me about growing turnips and about keeping soil biology alive," Craig said.
"Since 2009, I've been thinking about whether we can afford to do it."
Craig spent five days at Rick's property and through him, got to meet a lot of other farmers in South and North Dakota.
"I spent a week and a half over there and the everything they were doing with cover crops made sense," Craig said.
"When I came home, I said myself: 'I've got to get this working'."
After the trip, Craig understood that it was not moisture that was the limiting factor on his farm but the soil's ability to hold moisture.
"I started no-till in 1995 to try and save my soil, but with the dry, I had many low-residue years," he said.
"We can't really have break-crops here because it's just too dry. Canola works some years and gross margins can be okay but in other years, it doesn't.
"If can improve my soil and its water-holding capacity, hopefully I can improve my rotations and yields."
When Craig returned from his Nuffield studies in October last year, the first thing he did was buy a second-hand John Deere 1890 single-disc opener.
"But by the time I bought the seeder home from the Yorke Peninsula, harvest was finished. I ended-up sowing the cover crops only on January 28 when I had 3 millimetres of rain," he said.
Craig said cover crops should ideally go in as early as possible.
"Even with only that 3mm of rain, I couldn't believe what came up," he said.
His cover crop mix consists of cowpea, forage turnip, sunflowers, lentils, millet and canola.
"The idea is to have warm and cool-season grasses and warm and cool-season broadleafs," he said.
The cash crop species is left out of the mix, but the aim is to create as much diversity as possible.
"It's about trying to catch the nutrients in the soil and build biota back into the soil," he said.
*Full report in Stock Journal, March 29 issue, 2012.
