2011 Season

It's just so pretty around our farm at the moment with the canola starting to flower.


We've had about 25mm of rain in the last couple of days so that will really get the crop going, it was in need of a drink.

In our dry land broad acre cropping area, we don't irrigate, we rely on the weather. No rain, no crop.

 We reap about 3000 tonne of barley each year of several different varieties.


We are in no way organic, we use chemicals, that's just the way it is. 

The Barley crop can be attacked by red legged earth mite, lucerne flea and occasionally 'cut worm'. If we couldn't control these pests, half the crop wouldn't be worth reaping.






 

 Our cropping operation isn't very big compared to others, we crop just under 4000 acres each year and have merino sheep for wool within our pasture/crop rotation plans.

 We reap about 500 tonne of Canola each year.


The Canola crop contends with red legged earth mite, lucerne flea, blue oatmite, snails and occasionally the diamond back moth.


At this present time, we cannot grow a deliverable and descent yielding crop without chemicals.

 It does confuse me when the green groups get so aggressive in their rejection of Genetically Modified crops. I realise testing needs to be done to determine any long lasting ill-effects, but surely, being able to reduce our chemical use and maintain or grow our yields would be a good thing?

 In basic terms, the Canola plant produces flowers and little pods grow up the stems that contain tiny little black Canola seeds. They look a lot like really skinny bean pods. The flowers die off and the pods mature. The little black canola seeds are full of oil. Our best delivery for oil content was 49% oil last year. We get paid extra money for each percentage over the base rate of 42% oil.

So with the news reporting a yield growth of 20% is required in the next 15 years - I wonder how we are going to achieve this if some green groups continue to sabotage CSIRO testing of GM crops? Do they want the world to starve?

I honestly don't know what they want from farmers? 

Well, actually I do - but it's just not reality!!!