Helping Aussie farmers grow this AgDay

Riverine Plains is a farming systems group based across Wagga to Nagambi and Jerilderie across to Wodonga.

We specialise in farmer driven research that delivers on the ground benefits to our members.

Our members and farmers in the region are from drought prone areas, so we wanted to ensure they’re well equipped to prepare for drought in wetter seasons, especially the last season that we just went through.

The Future Drought Fund has been able to bring multiple farming systems groups together which allows us to reach a huge geographical footprint across the region.

We’ve been able to take the research that’s been done in these replicated trials and basically put it in real life scenarios with real farmers.

We are 55 kilometres east of Wagga. We farm just under 4,000 acres. We run quite a few composite ewes joined to terminal rams – poll dorsets.

The purpose of this trial in these two paddocks here behind me is based around the farming systems and optimal water sufficiency.

So in simple terms is, can we grow more grain per millimetre of rain?

So the overall hope for this trial was that we would take these proven drought measures and put them on a larger scale so that farmers could come in, see it and then implement it back on their property with the confidence that they’ve already seen it been proven.

When we moved here 20 years ago, grazing wheat and grazing canola crops were very minimal and everyone would just basically wait for the opening rains to germinate your sub clovers and other annual pasture species and lucerne, going to create your winter feed.

Overtime as we’ve discovered you sew your grain only crops and they grow pretty well, but you’ve got all this green biomass of feed sitting in a paddock, knowing you can’t fully utilise.

Farmlink is a non-for-profit organization. We work in extension and research and development.

So the 3 main concepts we’ve been looking at are end banking, nitrogen banking and diverse cropping so your legumes or your lupins and then we have also been looking at planting early and planting late.

In terms of the diversity part of this demonstration project the farmer has been finding that he has more crops to feed to his sheep, so he’s got vetch in the ground. He’s also finding the moisture in his soil is higher after panting a diverse crop, he’s also finding that he has a little bit more nitrogen in the soil for the next crop that he’s going to be putting in.

So we’ve been growing a lot more grazing wheats and now grazing canolas, we can sew on our opening rains in February/March and over time, we’ve become more confident in the grazing canolas and as we’ve seen we’re harvesting still amount of grain per hectare off our grazing crops, compared to our grain only crops, which are sewn a lot later.

As our rainfall pattern is changing, I believe we appear to be getting more February/March rain and a little less April/May rain, which traditionally you would sew grain only crops in May/June – we can sew quite confidently on the early rains and create some extra feed for our sheep in winter, which then enables us to increase our carrying capacity of our sheep.

By doing it for 13 years now, we’re ready to sew on the first rain in February or March. The crops germinate quite quickly, away from any soil and root diseases, and we’ll have feed within 4 to 6 weeks most years if we can get a good rainfall event.

We’ve just seen how many worms are here under the stubble load and the soil health that’s sustainable. I suppose it gives me peace of mind, that I know we’ve got good moisture here and that we can sew across a wider window because we’ve already had the opportunity to sew in February/March we know we’ve got sheep feed coming. On the next 5 or 10 millimetres of rain, it’s going to keep growing and growing.

Ever since I left school, Australia’s been talking about drought, or in major droughts. It’s always going to happen. So as long as we can prepare for the next one by having extra fooder on board, extra grain to feed our sheep, or be aware of the spring rainfall not being quite as good, we can prepare for it.

To me the way to really, really supercharge our knowledge is to combine the experience of the people on the land, in the organisations, in their own communities – with the best of the science. So really collaborate, bring all of that together and we’re building knowledge, not just from an academic “book-smart” point of view, but also from a real, experiential, learned “paddock-smart” point of view – bring those together.