AS the traditional Anzac Day break came to pass more WA farmers have pulled their seeding gear into paddocks for their 2018 seeding program.
The Pearson family, Miling, was one of the operations to start early this week with dry conditions making for a dusty start to the season on Nardy Farm.
Wade and Jenny Pearson have raised their three children on the mixed cropping and sheep property since buying the farm in 1992 and this year marks the second year their two sons Luke, 24 and Brady, 23, are both home for seeding.
Brady returned to the farm full-time a few years ago after attending boarding school at Aquinas College and spending a couple of years working in Perth, while Luke has come onboard in the past 12 months.
Luke works part-time on the farm while running his own business – LP Electrical Contracting – which services a broad region of the Wheatbelt.
“It’s going well, I split my time depending on what’s going on with the farm and with the business,” Luke said.
“I’ve only just started back here on the farm about a week ago, so that we could start to get ready and get all of seeding going.”
The boys are the fourth generation of the family to farm in the region and were gearing up for a busy few weeks when Farm Weekly dropped by on Friday.
This year, the family is sticking close to its usual cropping program and will plant 1000 hectares of wheat, 270ha of lupins and 150ha of canola.
They plan to kick off seeding by scratching in a few hectares of oats to feed their 800 breeding Merino ewes.
Last year was a “just below average” season on the farm, with a dry winter and frost having an impact on yields.
They’re approaching this season with cautious optimism and hoping the dry start to the year will be short-lived.
For the first time this year, Scepter will make up part of the wheat program, joining staple variety Mace in the mix.
With the past two seasons affected by frost, Wade said he hoped Scepter would hold up better than Mace in cold temperatures.
“Last year we got frosted in two or three paddocks but we really noticed it and in 2016 we lost about 30 per cent,” Wade said.
“It seems that Mace is a little bit more frost prone than previous varieties, so we’ve got some Scepter in this year and hopefully it might be a little bit better on frost.”
Lupins will again be planted to Barlock this year, while Stingray is the variety of choice for canola, after holding up well in tough conditions in 2017 and yielding 0.9 tonne per hectare.
Wade said the variety had been favoured on the farm for the past 10 years.
“We got out of jail last year, that’s why I’m still growing Stingray because it will always give me something, it’s less risky,” he said.
“It might not peak in a good year, but I’ve never had a failure with Stingray since I’ve been growing it.”
The major addition to the program this year is a new Goldacres SP sprayer, which was broken in over summer after 75 millimetres of rain in January.
Summer weeds have proven a growing problem on the farm in recent years and the whole property was sprayed early this year.
“Summer weeds are probably our biggest problem so we did have to spray every acre,” Wade said.
“It’s a lot harder now, we used to just go out for Mintweed with our summer weeds but now we’ve got Roly poly, Tar vine, Fleabane and windmill grass and if you don’t get onto that early you’re buggered.
“We’ve only done summer spraying on it, but the new sprayer has done well and we’ve got them under control.”
With no rain since January, the new sprayer hasn’t seen much action in recent weeks, but Brady will be in the driver’s seat while Luke pulls the DBS during seeding.
The lack of rain is nothing new to the farm and a soil amelioration program has played a major role in overcoming soil moisture constraints.
The cropable country – made up of heavy clays and sand plain – has all been mouldboarded, which has proven a worthy investment according to Wade.
“We finished the mouldboarding two years ago and we’ve noticed a massive difference, it’s fixed the non-wetting problem and it’s fixed the weed problem,” he said.
“It’s also given us a few headaches with chemical applications because it’s very different the way your chemicals work on it, so we’re still learning on that one.”
While cropping makes up the major part of the farm program, sheep also play an important role.
The family has benefited from high wool and sheep meat prices in recent years and hoped the trend would continue despite uncertainty within the live export market.
Wade said although he hadn’t sold sheep to the live trade for more than five years, he had some concerns about the flow-on effects a suspension or ban on exports would have on the market.
“We’ve just been selling to the abattoirs but I am a bit worried about the prices,” he said.
“Right now the mutton market and lamb markets – the markets that I sell to – they’re not affected yet but we’ll just have to wait and see.”
For the time being cropping is the focus and the crew will work long hours once seeding gets into full swing.
With two of their three children back on the farm and daughter Ellie living at home while working for CBH at the Miling receival bin throughout last harvest, it’s been a bit of an adjustment for Wade and Jenny, who just a few years ago were the only two on the property full-time.
“The food bill has certainly increased, but we wouldn’t have it any other way,” Jenny said.