Understanding Landscape Values Preview

Hi, I’m Jim, I farm 1200 ha south of Clare with my wife Mandy and my children; 11 year old Tom, 9 year old Bella and 4 year old Lucy.

We are crop growers and mostly we grow wheat, barley, canola, peas, beans and lentils. We’re growing more lentils than we have in the past because they are good for adding Nitrogen to the soil but also because they’ve now released some varieties that are coping better with dry finishes; and we seem to be getting more of them these days.

My family have always been farmers, I am the sixth generation of farmer on this same piece of land. Our family has been here over a hundred years and I really feel some responsibility to look after this land for my kids. I feel fortunate to be managing such a beautiful landscape, especially a place with a history that my family is so tied into.

Because our property was cleared around a hundred years ago, there is not much native vegetation remaining. For a while now we’ve been planting our fence lines with a mix of native species local to the area.

We’re using a mix of Golden Wattle, Sheoaks, Blue gums and Tea tree. We’re doing this to attract native animals and birds.

My father never thought so, and some of my mates don’t think so, but Ithink that it’s really important to consider the biodiversity of the farm, and I know it still needs to be improved. I am noticing some changes to the birdlife around our earlier plantings. I don’t know what they’re called but we are seeing birds where we never saw them before.

Another thing that we are planting along our fence lines, that I didn’t mention before is Christmas Bush. We’re including this in the mix because it has a great impact on biodiversity. It provides a source of food for native pollinators. We’re not doing it for the crops, because mostly the native pollinators prefer flowering native plants.

I’ve also been thinking about non-native pollinators.

They’re more important for us because they have an impact on our crops. Everybody talks about them being vulnerable to some sort of mite. You see it on Sixty Minutes and so on but nobody really seems to know what to do about it.

I know a bloke from the footy club who’s a beekeper. Wayne puts his bees on our place when our canola’s flowering we’re growing canola. He reckons his bees really find canola attractive, and can produce a lot of honey, but only if its warm when the flowering is happening. He’s tried to explain it all to me but I don’t really understand bees very well, they quite complicated.

Check out the video by Rob Mannining on why bees are good for canola.

After a lot of thought we’ve also made some other big changes. The thing that’s really been concerning us for a while is the possible impacts from climate change. What if it gets a bad as they are suggesting? We started thinking a while back that anything we could do to improve our use of rainfall would help us to grow better crops. We’d been steadily reducing the amount of cultivation that we’d do to plant a crop.

Five years ago we thought we’re going to have to “bite the bullet” and really get serious about it. Our old machinery wasn’t suitable for where we thought we needed to be heading. It was expensive, and I hated spending the money, but we went out and bought one of those disc seeders to allow us to do full no-till farming and retain as much soil moisture as possible.

And we’re definitely building up our levels of soil organic matter and increasing our soil carbon.

Check out the disc seeder demonstration video too!

The soil tests that I did when I took over from my dad averaged about 1.4% O.C. and now it’s close to 2%. It took nearly 20 years to do that so it’s not a quick process.

It seems quite remarkable but our agronomist says that we’d have over a hundred tonnes of carbon stored in each hectare. She said that what we are doing with carbon is really important because there is more stored in the soil than there is in the atmosphere. Seems hard to believe but she must be right. I know we’re growing some of the best crops we ever have, so it’s a good result all round.

We also needed to upgrade our tractor so we went for one with tracks to avoid soil compaction and let the crop extract more of the water from the soil. I know, not everybody likes the tracks, but we’ve had it for three years now and we think we’re starting to see some changes. You can’t see any tracks showing up in the crop any more, it’s much more even growth. That’s what we can see, but the agronomist says that if we can see it there’s a lot more stuff going on that we can’t see.

She’s kind of pushed us in this way a bit.

We’ve got some slopes on some of the farm and sometimes when it’s a bit wet we need all the traction you get from the tracks to get the seeder up them. When it’s full of fertiliser and grain there can be over 30 tonnes that we’re trying to get up those slopes. The tracks do a good job and there’s almost no slipping. The tractor’s nearly 400 horsepower and you know it’s using all of them.

We’ve got a pretty large chicken shed down the road. We’ve been experimenting with spreading the litter on some of our paddocks, especially the ones that are more susceptible to compaction. You get Phosphorus and Nitrogen but most of it is Carbon. Sometimes it gets a bit tricky to work out how much to put on, you don’t want to have too much Nitrogen.

The other problem is that it is fairly light and it can blow around a bit, and because we are not doing any cultivation and we don’t have suitable equipment, we’ve got to get contractors in to spread in the couple of week before we start planting. We think it makes sense, but we can only do a part of the farm each year because it’s so hard to organise the contractors.

I grew up in this area. The two conservation parks in the region were an important part of my younger years. We used to camp in Spring Gully with our youth group. We used to collect fallen branches from the stringybarks and have some of the biggest bonfires.

Later on I used to go to the Red Banks Conservation Park, the one by Burra, to go trail bike riding with some of my mates off the grazing properties around there. It was a lot of fun, going crazy on the bikes, bashing some of our own trails through the bush; but of course I wouldn’t do it now. Things have changed. I’ve gotta say it really annoys me now when I see people getting off the tracks now days. Even when people collect timber off the side of the road. I feel like calling the police or something.

Don’t they know that what they are doing is having an impact?

Some people say that the rainfall around here is already being affected by climate change, but others don’t seem so sure about that.

We’ve taken the approach that regardless of whether it’s happening or not, we are going to make changes to our management practices, especially the ones dealing with water management. Mandy and I think that changing our farming practices to make the most use of the water that falls on our farm is one of the ways that we can reduce the impacts of less rainfall due to climate change.

You know, even if the climate doesn’t change it’s still going to pay off in those dry years that we get around here.

It’s cost us a heap to buy the machinery but straight away we’ve found that going to full stubble retention and no-till really reduced the run-off that we used to see on some parts of the farm. That water’s staying on our farm and being used by our crops. It’s got to be adding to our bottom line. And what’s more it’s not carrying my topsoil down the hill to my neighbour.

My mate up at Burra has a lot of trouble with erosion after heavy rains; he never keeps enough ground cover on the banks. He always seems to push his sheep too hard, the plants are always grazed down to the ground. They just wash away with the first heavy rain. It’s just a mess. I keep telling him he’s got to do something about it but he just says “it’s alright for you wealthy croppers - you just don’t understand the pressures of running sheep in this low rainfall country”.

I don’t think he’s changed that much since we used to go bike riding together. He could do something without spending a lot if he really wanted to.

My mate from Burra is on the dry side of Goyder’s line. His rainfall’s around 250 mm, it’s less than half of what we get and it’s only about an hour away.

It’s interesting when I drive there. You can see it so easily in the landscape, the vegetation just changes from the higher rainfall species to saltbush, bluebush and some mallees. The old blokes have always said that for every mile that you drive east of the line the rainfall drops by an inch. For me the problem is not just the amount of rainfall, it’s how reliable the rainfall is.

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