Turning unproductive land into profit

Ian, who farms with his wife Joan and son Mike and his wife Melinda, identified that areas of his family property at Cranbrook were going to need regenerating in order for them to continue farming.

They had areas of low lying land that was susceptible to waterlogging and over the years had developed salinity issues.

“We didn’t have a salt problem, we have an excess water problem,” Ian said.

“Salt was in the soil before we cleared it. The problem comes about when you have salt and waterlogging together.

“When they are separate it is not an issue, but when they come together that is when productivity goes.

“What we had to do was negate this problem and the way we did it is to put plants back down.

“We wanted to try and replicate what nature did before we cleared the land.”

Over time these areas of land were increasing to the point where there were some paddocks that were almost totally unproductive for cropping or running livestock.

“It was either do something about the issue or sell up and buy somewhere better,” Ian said.

“Doing nothing would have meant slowly going broke.”

The search for something to regenerate this poorer country led the Walshes to saltbush in the early 1980s.

“There was a lot of work being done at the time by Clive Malcolm, who was with the Department of Agriculture, in the saltbush area,” Ian said.

“Clive went around the world finding plants that would grow and found all these different salt bushes and trialled them in different environments in WA.

“From this work he found that three varieties worked well and they are what we are still using today.

“Ed Barret Lennard worked with Clive towards the end of his career and took on that work and continued it.”

Through the Department’s research work, Ian decided to trial some saltbush on some of their salt-impacted land.

Initially he started out just planting saltbush on its own but soon realised that was just one part of a whole production system that needed to be implemented.

“The saltbush grew okay but we needed something else to provide even better feed value and to suck up more water so we planted perennials and annuals under the saltbush canopy,” Ian said.

“This was very effective in using up that excess water and at the same time provided valuable feed for sheep at a time when it was needed.”

Effectively, the system was able to regenerate the poor country and at the same time filled the autumn feed gap.

“The perennials really got going in that February to March period, which was when there was a feed gap across the property,” Ian said.

“The regime also enabled us to dry out the soil profile during summer and even though we were still getting waterlogging in winter, it was happening a lot later than it used to.

“Because the plants were getting established before the waterlogging took effect, they were able to survive and the annuals took off in spring.

“Saltbush is the pioneer species of the system really. It may only provide 800kg to 1200kg per hectare of feed, but with a combination of it and the grasses, it is a very productive grazing system.”

Ian said they had a big area of land that couldn’t be cropped and was unproductive to run livestock on.

“What we have found since we implemented this system is that we can keep our cropping area up and increase sheep numbers without impacting on those cropping acres,” he said.

“We are carrying a lot more sheep on this country and they were doing well on it.”

Recent results of trials carried out by the CSIRO are backing up what Ian is seeing first hand (see story page 62).

Another game changer for Ian was the introduction of electromagnetic readings (EM31 and EM38).

This showed the improvement in those areas that were affected by salt, but more importantly provided Ian with information on where the next problem areas may be.

“That has been a big development,” Ian said.

“Prevention is always better than cure. Being able to identify areas that may have a salt problem down the track means we can put a perennial system over that area and keep the water table down and keep that country productive.

Of their 1600ha property, the Walshes have now regenerated about 400ha.

Of that 90ha has been turned around completely to the point it can now be cropped or carry a traditional annual grazing system.

Ian says the turnaround in some paddocks has been remarkable.

“Some paddocks you wouldn’t have even bothered putting sheep into, we have been able to turn them around,” he said.

“We have had some paddocks that we were running two sheep to the hectare and after putting the saltbush and perennials down we are running seven sheep to the hectare on them.”

Ian said their whole farming system is based on having a bad start every year.

“We shear at the end of March and lamb in July,” he said.

“We have options as to what we can do with our ewes, particularly in a year like this.

“The dry stock have already gone and the young wethers for export have been turned off in May and June as well as our cull ewes.

“The system is designed for us to lighten right off into July, and the perennials have made a huge difference to getting those stock to good weights and getting them off the property.

“The good thing about running young wethers is they don’t have to be in prime condition to sell for export. They can be in forward store condition, but if you were running prime lambs then they need to be just that – prime.

“We can get the wethers through summer well and then they are gone in May and June when sheep are in tight supply.”

The solid sheep and wool prices are pretty pleasing for the Walshes at the moment.

“The wethers cut 4kg of 16.9 micron wool at 9mo when we shore them in March and that wool sold for about $15 a kilogram,” Ian said.

“We sold the wethers for $100, so when you add on the wool price, you can’t do much better than that for a 10-month-old lamb.”

They are currently running sheep at about seven winter grazed dry sheep equivalent.

“It is probably not a huge amount compared to some areas, but given we have light soils we don’t want to graze paddocks too heavily over summer,” Ian said.

Some areas of the farm which were almost locked up and forgotten about are now running 15 sheep to the hectare for two months over summer.

“We are getting a 50 gram per day weight gain for sheep on this land, which isn’t huge but it is maintaining them when we have that feed gap and it enables more flexibility within the whole enterprise,” Ian said.

“We are also getting 1188 sheep grazing days per hectare on some of this land, whereas in the past we would have had a quarter of that.

“So the system has really turned our farming enterprise around and given where sheep and wool prices are now, the more land we can utilise to run sheep is a bonus.”