Passionate farmer is driven by diversity

Joe Dewar, 28, who farms with his father Frank at Lime Peaks Grazing, Guilderton, has done that this year – not by dipping his toe in the water to test the temperature, but by jumping in the deep end.

In March, Joe added a 1600 hectare grazing and cropping property at Coorow to Lime Peaks’ string of seven owned and leased blocks along the coastal strip from Guilderton to Lancelin and Dandaragan.

Seven weeks ago he added a second 1600ha property, 10 minutes further up the road at Carnamah.

He has bought in 2000 Merino ewes as the nucleus of a commercial self-replacing Merino flock, initially to the Coorow property but as that has grazed out, the sheep have been mostly moved to the Carnamah property.

As reported in Farm Weekly last month, Joe was volume buyer – with Primaries of WA’s wool manager Greg Tilbrook advising him – at the recent Parakeelya Poll Merino stud ram sale.

On a budget, he paid $800 for seven good-value, large framed, plain-bodied, paddock-run rams and to a top of $1000 for another six.

After snapping up three passed-in rams and with more rams selected after the auction, he took home 28 for his Merino flock.

Joe has since bought more rams “as a top up” from Alex Keamy, Anro Poll Merino stud, Watheroo.

Lime Peaks’ existing flock of 2000 first-cross Merino-Poll Dorset ewes has also been moved to Coorow and Carnamah and both flocks are going through the shearing shed for an even-up shearing.

Cash flow from the sale of wool and from 900 store lambs destined for Adelaide will go towards paying for shearers, rams and new properties.

“The plan is to keep all the best (Merino) ewes up there, get rid of the wethers and put all the cull ewes in the crossbred flock to keep the numbers up, but at this stage it’s sort of suck it and see,” Joe said last week.

“We haven’t bred Merinos before, this is a trial run to see which way works better.

“In the past we’ve always just gone and bought ewes in, but they get expensive and often you can’t get what you want unless you pay top of the market.”

Joe said the cost of replacement ewes for his crossbred flock was a critical factor in deciding to diversify into breeding Merinos and producing wool.

“We’ve always bred our own cattle – whenever we’ve bought cattle in they never do as well.

“So we’re just going to try the same theory out on the sheep,” he said.

Another factor was strong wool prices.

“It’s not just the sheep, I like wool, it’s a nice product,” Joe said.

“As long as (wool) prices stay near where they are, it makes it worth doing.

“We just bought lines in from all over and the average (so far) is just under 20 microns, the clip’s coming off not too bad now.

“It’s fine enough to turn into everyday clothes – how many Italian suits do they sell?

“The rest of it doesn’t have to be 16 microns – you can’t get rid of it and you only get 1.8 kilogram cut.

“Volume seems to be what we do here (in WA) in everything we do, whether its wool or lambs or cropping, it’s all volume.”

At about $6 per sheep to shear them, it is also not a big additional impost for a good return, according to Joe.

He went straight onto the farm after he left the local school 10 years ago and there was never any doubt about what he wanted to do.

“You wouldn’t do farming if you didn’t love it,” Joe said.

He credits his father with being “fifty:fifty” in decision-making, but the drive to diversify and grow comes from Joe.

In his time Lime Peaks’ cattle numbers have multiplied many times and the Angus cow herd – the main enterprise until now – numbers about 1000 head.

“For the past 10 years we’ve mostly bred stores,” Joe said.

“We just breed them and hang onto them until they are ready to go, there’s been good money if you’ve had good lines of store cattle.”

With his involvement the sheep enterprise had also grown.

“I’ve been breeding crossies for some time and we introduced Merino ewes about five years ago,” he said.

The Dewar family – Joe is a sixth-generation farmer – opened up the area around Guilderton across to Gingin and the family name appears regional street and road signs.

Despite a more reliable rainfall than inland, Joe is well aware of the agricultural limitations of the sand plain coastal strip.

“It’s good for fattening livestock but that’s about all it’s good for,” is his opinion, and another reason to look to diversify into the Wheatbelt.

Joe has a 200ha barley crop at Lancelin which, on past experience, will be “good for sheep or cattle feed but it doesn’t grade that well”, while a wheat crop at Coorow “bounced out of the ground and we fed it off every four weeks or so which was pretty handy”.

But adapting to the Wheatbelt is still a learning curve and he said 800ha of lupins proved an expensive way of putting on fertiliser.

“Our lupins didn’t work because it didn’t rain enough, it’s non-wetting (soil), they didn’t go in at exactly the right time, we put them in early so by the time it rained the seed was all blown in and two inches underground,’’ he said.

“Some of it is just shooting now.”

Perhaps most compelling of the reasons for diversifying into Merinos and wool are changing socio-economic dynamics of the area where he grew up and his forebears farmed.

Rising land values along the coast are putting farm properties beyond reach for outright purchase and making leasing more expensive.

“They want investment value for land down here, whereas it’s cheaper up north,” Joe said.

In the driest year he can remember on the farm, he bought two de-stocked Wheatbelt properties cheaply.

They have proved their worth already by providing stock feed when it was in short supply on the coastal properties.

“We were handfeeding for three months when we don’t normally give them anything, so that tells you how bad it was,” he said.

“The Coorow and Carnamah properties are sheep blocks, it’s poor country, they need a lot of work, but it’s the place to start (in Merinos and wool).

“But if you were 65, you wouldn’t buy one.”