Potatoes, onions and lamb not only combine well in a hearty meal, but have also proven a good mix at Murphy Farms, Thorpdale.
The extended Murphy family and staff have produced these three commodities for many years, and it is a successful recipe in terms of production schedules and paddock rotations.
The Murphy Farms Partnership was established by three brothers, Doug (now deceased), Phil and Ewan, who ramped up the family farm’s potato and onion production and gradually bought more land.
Phil and Ewan are still involved but are a stepping back to let Ewan’s sons Glenn and Stuart take on more of its management.
The farm is more than 500 hectares of good quality red soil and all of it can be irrigated with water from dams and a creek. The vegetables and summer crops are irrigated from around October to March or April, depending on the season, and summer crops are either mulched or fed to sheep.
They grow onions or potatoes in a paddock for two or three years and then put in a fodder crop.
In early July, the team, which includes 17 permanent and seasonal workers mostly from the local Latrobe Valley, was finishing grading the potatoes.
Phil said as soon as they sent off the potatoes, they would move onto weighing and bagging onions. The sowing and harvesting of the two main crops similarly work well around each other.
Different varieties are grown with the main being Golden Delight potatoes and brown onions.
“What customers require and the specifications and varieties change all the time,” Phil said.
Nephew Glenn said it was a balancing act to get most of the crops within ever-changing specification ranges to ensure the got the best value for the crops.
“We aim to get the biggest saleable yield,” he said.
To this end, they target most of their crop to bulk bags for supermarkets that are generally within 100 to 400 grams, but that does vary for each supermarket’s order. The team also tries to get very large potatoes for potato cakes, but they do not target that size range because there would be too many potatoes that fell between the supermarket and potato cake sizes.
“This year, there have been avenues to processors for those odd sized potatoes,” Glenn said.
The crop is sampled every week with potatoes weighed to determine how much more time it needs in the ground growing or how much water it requires.
Any potatoes or onions that are too small are fed to the sheep and provide a buffer to the Gippsland winter feed gap. The family runs 3000-3500 Border Leicester-Merino ewes and join them to Southdowns or Poll Dorsets from January.
All the ewes are pregnancy scanned, with the dry ewes put in the paddock with the ram again for two more cycles and the in-lamb ewes divided between those carrying single or multiple foetuses, and the multiples put on better feed and in smaller, more sheltered paddocks.
The empties are given a second chance and scanned again. If they are still not in-lamb, they are sold.
Phil said foxes were a big problem in the area, so the team shoots and baits them and has alpacas. He said the survival rate had improved over the years and the lambing percentage was now about 150 per cent.
Another family member passionate about agriculture is Phil’s wife Val, who has run agritourism tours in Gippsland for about 25 years.
She started when the state-wide group Women on Farms came to visit the farm and she provided a potato-themed lunch in the garden. Since then, it has grown to organising bus tours of up to one week in Gippsland, which include visiting farms and tourist attractions.
Val organises itineraries and is the tour guide for groups including seniors groups, Probus clubs and some school groups. Many travel from Melbourne and interstate and Val is hoping to attract more international tourists. The groups still visit Val’s garden where she has working dog demonstrations and offers potato ice cream.
“It's a learn-a-little-laugh-a-lot day's outing, with lots of jokes and poems relating to life on the land” she said.
