TECHNOLOGICAL advancement is making life easier for Nokanning farmer Mick Caughey.
The season started out like most, with no rain in sight, although he was confident seeding into the paddock, east of Merredin, by using the SoilWaterApp.
Mr Caughey lives with his wife Kate who is active on the farm with finances, grain marketing and driving the header.
Together they have three children – Tom, 15, is at Aquinas and twins Digby and Eliza, 11, are both at the local school in Merredin.
“Next year we’ll be empty nesters with the twins heading off to school in Perth, Eliza will be going to Santa Maria and Digby will go to Aquinas with his older brother,” Mr Caughey said.
This third-generation farmer runs a 5000 hectare cropping program with 2400ha of wheat (Mace and Corack), 2100ha of barley (Scope, Spartacus and Fathom) and 500ha of oats (Carralop and Durack).
“We are spread out between Merredin and Nungarin, which is good on a year like this where the rainfall is patchy – one property will get it and the other won’t,” Mr Caughey said.
With their summer rainfall just over 100 millimetres, he was confident starting his season as normal.
“We had really good summer moisture so it was still put the crop in as normal, we had a really dry seeding for a bit of it and we busted a bit of gear, but it was really worth doing it,” Mr Caughey said.
The SoilWaterApp was created by the University of Southern Queensland last year as a new tool to measure water in the soil.
The application is something that Mr Caughey uses frequently when seeing how much moisture he has available in his soil, this depending on rainfall and soil type.
“It just shows how much different soil types can hold,” Mr Caughey said.
“I looked at that before seeding and thought we need to get stuck into it out there before the soil dries up.
“It is an interesting way of looking at things quickly without having soil probes in and other technology.
Mr Caughey has had to find other ways to vitalise every bit of rain that falls on his property.
For the past 10 years he has been seeding in furrows to chase the moisture.
“We are using Real Time Kinetic (RTK) to go back in our same furrow every year,” he said.
“RTK is the accuracy of the auto steer.
“The tower receives the signals from the satellite and that tower gives that exact location.
“So every year you know where you are, although the tower doesn’t go that far, so if you have multiple properties you would need another tower.
“We do all of this because moisture is so important to us out here, and especially establishing the crop.
“We had a little bit of crop die this year which is very rare but it did happen.”
The dry conditions limit the different type of crops the Caugheys feels confident in growing, although this proves challenging with other issues that arise.
“I’m not a big fan of canola, I think it is too hot and dry out here to get a result,” Mr Caughey said.
We have been growing cereals continuously for quite a long time and we are starting to come into some disease issues and weed resistance.”
Although the late weather has proved beneficial for some areas of the crop that had a particularly late establishment.
“In the past four weeks we have had between 30-60mm, depending on the property we are at,” he said.
Mr Caughey said it had been pretty good and the crops were really hanging on, and some of the later stuff that wasn’t going to be harvested now would be.
“Most of the program is ready to harvest, other than some of the paddocks that had later establishment and are still green,” he said.
Crops are expected to be ready for harvest from this week.
