Be prepared and stick with what you know grain growers told

Highlight of the morning session was the farmer review of the 2017 season.

Kaniva farmer Sam Eastwood and Nandaly farmer Terry Kiley from Nandaly were interview by Lawloit farmer and BCG board member Alan Bennett.

Mr Eastwood crops about 1350 hectares mainly for grain and small percentage for hay.

Nandaly’s Terry Kiley farms about 9000 hectares with two sons and has been continuous cropping for 15 years with 50:50 cereals and legumes.

Mr Eastwood said the challenge in his business, after a reasonable year in 2016, was shifting the rotation to 50 percent cereal with the balance lentils and canola.

Both the lentils and canola were “a risk” but provided a happy medium between risk and reward.

He said the 2017 season had been challenging, but his take home message was to be organised and prepared to take advantage of spray windows in particular.

Mr Kiley said he believed in sticking to what he knew he could grow.

His rotation was 50:50 cereals and legumes after dropping canola from the program.

He said farmers also needed to be on the ball in regards to high mouse numbers.  

CSIRO senior researcher Jaclyn Brown also spoke at the day about a collaborative project with the Bureau of Meteorology.

She said the bureau was investigating the way farmers access their weather information in order to test and develop better weather and climate information for the grains industry.

The aim of the project was to make sure the information was specific for grain growers.

She talked about the importance of providing the right information, when the farmer wanted it.

She said there was no one, single app currently available that did everything.

“Currently the message from farmers is that information is too general and often the information was forecasting what was not going to happen,” she said.

Dr Brown said a new one-stop-weather-shop would be just for growers, providing information at a level of skill, or risk, that growers were willing to tolerate.