KOJONUP farmers Peter and Emily Hills have taken the term "having a crack" to a new level.
And their story should be an inspiration, particularly to young people in the agribusiness industry who maybe having doubts about "having a crack".
Perhaps surprisingly, Peter and Emily were "townies" working in a Kojonup business - Peter as a qualified boilermaker and Emily in accounts administration.
Love was their first foundation stone and after getting married in 2006, they decided to start their own contracting business, involving spraying, seeding, spreading and harvesting.
The pivotal moment in their budding careers came the following year when they share-cropped a local farm.
While northern farmers suffered badly from a poor season, Peter vividly remembers taking off 2tonnes/hectare average canola crops ($750 a tonne) and 4t/ha average barley crops ($460/t).
"That set us up," Peter and Emily chorused.
In 2008, they leased 800ha and continued share cropping and contracting.
Over the next seven years, careful acquisitions saw them establish a farm five kilometres west of Kojonup, on the Boyup Brook road.
This year they will crop 2200ha in Kojonup and run 4000 Merinos and cross-bred lambs, using locally-sourced White Suffolk rams.
That's the farming story in a nutshell.
The other story is Peter and Emily's unbridled enthusiasm for making machines, particularly anything that you can hang an "Em" on.
Try the rotary rock picker they build (Pick Em) or the chaser bin (Chase EM) or the super shed - Shed Em, no, stick with super shed.
Then there's custom-made orders for truck bins, seeding bar "makeovers" adding disc floats and designing a new seed boot, which is to be unveiled later this year.
The pair also have designed and built a triple 7000 litre liquid cart - one tank for pre-emergent treatments, one for nitrogen and one for soil wetters and in-furrow mixes - reflecting their ability to custom-make farm machinery.
They're also in the process of designing a deep tiller (Till Em?).
The Hill's latest pride and joy is the Catch Em, a revolutionary-designed chaff cart, which was spawned during a conversation at the kitchen table in 2014.
Talk turned to designs and functions, including an industry-first belly dump, triggered by optional automatic GPS software, via a special in-cab controller.
A casual glance at the bread bin sitting on the kitchen bench provided the "light bulb" moment - imagine turning the bin over and opening the curved lid - voila!
Design considerations also had to include 3m spacings to make it control traffic-ready, durable belt systems running off one hydromotor and a solid shroud and deflectors.
"It took between 200 and 300 hours of just thinking about the design and playing around on the Auto CAD to get what we wanted," Peter said.
The end result is a three model series with capacities of 30, 45 and 60m3.
The Catch Em has plenty of features including front axle pull, GPS auto dump (manual dump option), custom paint and chaff cart controller.
The latter contains sophisticated software specifically designed for the auto-dump mode, which operates on-the-go via electro-hydraulics when GPS co-ordinates are triggered.
In keeping with supporting WA manufacturers, Peter and Emily source locally with Catch Em panels laser-cut by Kayana Engineering, Mandurah, and wiring for electro-hydraulic operations from Kojonup Auto Electrics.
Hydraulics are sourced from Kewdale firm HWC.
"We fabricate ourselves for quality control," Peter said.
"We employ two full-time welders and I take up the slack when it's needed.
"When there's no welding, we all do farm work."
The limited manufacturing run last year has proven hugely successful and Peter and Emily are taking orders for the 2016 harvest.
"We have after-harvest terms available and finance available," Peter said.
Naturally, there's a Catch Em cart on the Hills' farm - considered one of the tools in the toolbox for controlling weed seed burdens.
"Using the cart over the past two years, we can see big reductions in weeds," she said.
"It has given us extra confidence in how we plan our rotations in terms of cleaning up paddocks and in some places, you could argue the chaff cart does a better job of cleaning up weeds than canola.
"We still maintain spraying because ryegrass is so persistent and you can't afford to be lax about weed control."
The other advantage of the chaff dumps has been the excellent sheep feed.
"We run joined ewes on chaff dumps in canola stubble and we're getting lambing percentages about 85 per cent not scanned on canola heaps with no supplementary feed," Emily said.
With good rains throughout the property, Peter and Emily are geared for seeding.
The earlier start is another positive in what could turn out to be a positively terrific year.
"EM" NOTE: Emily runs the livestock side of the business with the help of staff and also forms part of the driving roster at seeding and harvest, while Peter juggles his time between the computer, the factory and farming duties.