AFTER a March 25 start to seeding, last week canola was well and truly out of the ground on the Godfrey’s Cunderdin property.
David Godfrey – who runs a sheep and mixed cropping farm with wife Amanda, daughter Holly, and son Tom – planted 150 hectares of long season Roundup Ready IH51 variety canola for the first time this year.
“We put canola in in March a few years ago but it was TT canola and the weeds beat us,” David said.
“That was a variety that wasn’t long season, so we got this long season stuff this year.”
Since starting seeding a month ago, the team had almost finished sowing their 640ha canola program when Farm Weekly visited last Wednesday and was preparing to start planting Mandelup lupins.
“We work on roughly between 30 and 40 per cent lupins or legume and then 60 or 70pc other,” David said.
“Given that it’s only just after ANZAC day and we’ve got all of the canola in, it’s certainly going to ease us up a bit.”
The rest of the 3900ha program will be made up of Mace and Cobra variety wheat, Spartacus, Hindmarsh and Scope barley, Carrolup oats for hay and peas.
About 330 millimetres of rain had already fallen on the Cunderdin farm, with some patches receiving 20mm over the previous weekend.
“We got a range from 4.5 to 21mm, we were under a cell right when we’d just finished some of our canola too, so hopefully that comes out.”
Despite already receiving most of the farm’s 350mm annual average rainfall, David said he was surprised at the depth of subsoil moisture, after trialling deep ripping for the first time.
“The deep ripping will be interesting to see how that turns out, because it was coming up dry which was surprising,’’ he said.
“We didn’t do a lot because we’re new at it, this is the first year so we wanted to trial bits and pieces to see if it can actually get over it.”
The high rainfall led to an increased amount of summer spraying, with several paddocks sprayed twice for melons and volunteer cereals prior to seeding.
The team planned to start working around the clock by the end of last week, doing 12 hour shifts on their 12.2 metre (40ft) John Deere Air-Hoe drill in order to finish seeding by early June.
“We’ve got a fairly big program with little machines, so we’ll start going 24 hours,” David said.
