THE frustrations of farming are many, and they don't get any easier to deal with according to Kellerberrin farmer Matt Steber.
But with the tractor on its last paddock and dark clouds on the horizon signalling rain, Matt was a happy man when Farm Weekly visited him last week.
Matt ended up with 14 millimetres last Thursday, which just so happened to be his single biggest rainfall event of the growing season.
He said it had been a good start to the season so far, but was still cautious about looking too far ahead.
"That's the thing with farming, you can do everything right but if it doesn't rain, or rain at the right time, or rain enough, then none of that matters," Matt said.
He said coming to terms with that fact had been one of the surprises of the last 25 years.
"You think it you would get used it but it doesn't seem to get any easier," he said.
Matt is a third generation farmer and had been back on the farm full time since the mid-1980s.
He now runs the business together with his wife Allie and his parents Lou and Lyn, along with his four sons Tom, Rory, Lachie and Paddy.
Matt also employs two full time staff, Jason Clarke and Michael Cole.
They crop 9600 hectares of their 10,300ha property and run 900 Merino ewes.
Matt admitted he wasn't a "sheep man" but said although 95 per cent of the farm was put to crop, livestock still played an important role in their business.
"There are some soil types that don't lend themselves to continuous cropping and it is nice to be able to rest those problem paddocks to get an extra weed kill," he said.
"So sheep are handy to have in that sense."
The Stebers run a low maintenance AMS flock and Matt said they used contract rams to keep their sheep operation simple.
They aimed to lamb in late June in order to drop onto green feed as Matt said they didn't have the time or the man-power to be feeding pregnant or lambing ewes during seeding.
"Because we don't hand-feed sheep at all we end up making a fairly good return off them," he said.
"We can get them up to condition on the stubbles and for the past three years we have also been grazing the crops."
Matt said they tried not to put any sheep on the paddocks that had been left out of the cropping program until the end of June.
"By grazing the crops we are able to buy time for those pasture paddocks and it allows them to build up some biomass," he said.
"We started off doing a few trials with the Kellerberrin Demonstration Group which showed there isn't a yield penalty with crop grazing.
"It is also a handy way to manipulate the flowering time of the crop, for every two days of grazing we delay flowering for one day, which reduces frost risk."
Over the years, the Stebers had gradually cut back their sheep numbers which Matt said had been similar to a lot of farmers in the Central and Eastern Wheatbelt.
But he said despite being almost entirely all cropping at present, sheep would always be part of the system.
Matt said although farming was tough and could at times be frustrating; it was a rewarding and versatile livelihood.
He said the last decade had been tough but he was reluctant to admit there was a crisis.
"When you talk to the older farmers they will tell you that there have always been bad decades," he said.
"But there have also been good ones, so we will just have to wait for a good one.
"But in the past I think there was a lot more fat in the system though so getting through those harder times wasn't as tough as it is now."
Matt said high input costs and stagnant commodity prices meant there was not a lot of room for mistakes.
He said due to the nature of farming, profit margins were getting smaller and smaller.
"Farming is the only business that has no control over two of its three major profit drivers," Matt said.
"We can't control the rain, and we can't control the prices. The only thing we have any say over is our management."
He said it was possible to manipulate prices by hedging, but there was still no control over the direction of the prices.
Matt believed in being aggressive in hedging grain prices when they were perceived to be high, or above the median, and would often lock in prices up to three years in advance.
But despite the challenges, Matt said no one was forcing him to farm and he wouldn't want to be doing anything else.
He said one of the best things about the job was the variety.
"You could be building a shed one day, up to your elbows in grease the next and selling CBOT Put options the day after that. You don't get that sort of versatility in any other industry," Matt said.
"Being a part of a country community is also very rewarding, there is nothing quite like it."
Matt said he believed the future was bright for farming in WA.
He said with technology continuing to develop it was impossible to comprehend what farming would even look like in the next 50 years.
"I remember building a 30-foot gate when I first got back home in the 80s and thinking 'Wow, we will never have machines bigger than this'," Matt said.
"But now we have an 80 foot air-seeder.
"It is scary to even imagine how big things are going to get or what the next big technological advancement is going to be.
"One thing is for sure, the next 50 years are not going to be boring."