Storage with hip pocket benefits

Mr Luehman has been building his on-farm storage capacity over the past 15 years and can now store up to 2000 tonnes of grain above ground on his 2000-hectare farm west of Swan Hill in central Victoria.

He says having the storage available provides options but doesn’t necessarily mean he always uses it to capacity.

“If the pricing isn’t right, or the grain price at harvest is high, then I won’t store as much on-farm,” he says.

“It doesn’t really cost me that much more to leave the storage full or empty, but it’s certainly given me more marketing options.”

Mr Luehman used to grow a range of crops including pulses and legumes, but due to the variable and changing climate he now concentrates mainly on wheat and barley, with some hay production, and store and feedlot lambs in summer.

The region used to boast an average growing season rainfall of 200 millimetres but the 150mm that fell last season was the best since 2004.

Mr Luehman says the best thing about on-farm storage is the ability to blend grain to meet quality specifications.

“Last harvest, some of my H1 wheat (hard milling quality wheat) fitted nearly every specification, but was contaminated with too much barley grain.

“If it had been delivered at harvest it would have been downgraded to feed quality, however it was not shot and sprung, had good protein and high falling numbers.

“I was able to store it on-farm and forward sell to a local end user for a premium of $35/tonne over and above the then price for feed grain.”

He says a harvest 1000 tonnes of this wheat resulted in about $40,000 extra profit.

“I had some minimal storage and interest costs, but I’m still way better off to have done that than to have taken the lower price if I’d delivered it in town.

“The other big advantage of having on-farm storage is at harvest, where if we have a good season and have contractors in, the on-farm storage means we can quickly shift the grain away from the headers and keeping the harvest moving.”

Neil Luehman has strong views about grain storage hygiene to minimise losses from pests, and builds his marketing program around his grain hygiene regime.

He’s developed a rigorous hygiene strategy as a result of attending regular Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) Grower Updates and also participating in the Birchip Cropping Grower group.

The GRDC’s recently produced Stored Grain Pests Fact Sheet is also a useful reference document.

He runs a mix of older unsealed silos and newer sealed ones and says he likes to have all the silos empty and all the grain off the farm by the start of September.

“I like to clean up all the sites so there’s no spilt grain around, and wash and fumigate the silos twice,” Mr Luehman says.

He washes the silos down twice from when they’re emptied to when they’re refilled.

“You’ve got to do that because of the eggs – the first time you may not get the eggs, and then the eggs hatch and you’ve got a very short period of time to bring the numbers down. It’s really just a numbers game.”

Mr Luehman says hygiene management does add to the pressure of selling and shifting grain in time for the next harvest as the grain has to be out by September to give two clear months of time to clean things up.

“I do the chemical wash down at the beginning of October and then again at the beginning of November, prior to harvest.”

Mr Luehman stores the grain to be contracted out early in the unsealed silos. As that grain goes in, it’s treated with a knock-down chemical, dichlorvos. The sealed silos are used for longer term storage and treated with phosphene.

He believes it’s difficult to stop the weevils completely, but the better the hygiene, the smaller the outbreak and the later it is.

Any old grain hanging around provides the ideal place for weevils to breed up and get into the silos early.

He’s certainly seeing resistance in farms around the area, but mainly to the knockdown pesticide, dichlorvos.

“I actually think it’s largely because some growers are not reading the labels and using the chemicals properly,” Mr Luehmann says.

“Ten per cent of the build up of pests is caused by some people unintentionally not treating the grain correctly, for example not getting full coverage of the grain when it’s getting treated — that’s a sure way to build up resistance.”

While he hasn’t experienced it on his farm, Mr Luehman is concerned about resistance to phosphene as he sees it as his last line of defence against insects. He believes some farmers simply leave it too long before deciding to fumigate.

“People tend to wait to see weevils in the sealed silos and then just fumigate them once but the eggs don’t get affected by the gas.

“You still need to fumigate them twice as the double knock seems to get a much better result controlling weevils in the sealed silos.”

Mr Luehman says he is fortunate to be in close proximity to end-users such as dairy farms and feed mills within 150-200 kilometres.

“Each year I forward sell on average around 80pc of my grain crop, and store it here on farm till it’s needed.

“There’s no doubt the system works really well and over the years I know I’ve received significant premiums because of the options and marketing flexibility on-farm storage has given me.”

For more information on grain storage and to download the GRDC Stored Grain Pests fact sheet, visit www.grdc.com.au/factsheets