Raised beds deliver with GM canola

Together with his brother Bernard and their wives Bernadette and Kate, the family crops 3400 hectares, as well running 500 breeding cattle and operate a rural merchandising business.

The Fetherstonhaughs have a property on the southern WA coast which receives around 600 millimetres of rainfall and a second property about thirty kilometres inland, which averages 500mm.

They operate a cereal-canola rotation, producing wheat, barley and canola, with about half of their properties consisting of raised beds, which have again proved themselves this season.

“It can get very wet here and even on our home property we’ve had 175mm in 14 days, which has seen the raised beds save a lot of our cropping country from going under,” Mr Fetherstonhaugh said.

“Not every year you use it but it does come in very handy when it gets really wet.

“The raised beds are there permanently and we crop them every year but we don’t always get the benefits, as if it doesn’t rain a lot you don’t get the extra benefit out of having beds.”

The beds do bring some challenges for machinery but once it has been set up properly, there isn’t that much of a challenge.

“We operate a two centimetre GPS system, where we run tramlines and we’ve set our machines up in three metre wheel spacings with the header, the seeder, the sprayer and the spreader all on a three metre spacing,” he said.

“We’ve got permanent three metre tramlines and the beds are three metres so all the machines fit into the furrows or we fallow the tram lines, depending on which paddock you are in.

“There’s a 400mm gap in between the beds for the machinery wheel to travel in.”

Like all producers, herbicide resistance is a major issue for the Fetherstonhaugh family.

“I go about managing herbicide resistance by using rotations, swapping chemical groups all the time, double knocking and we have now started to use Roundup Ready canola,” he said.

“We’re trying to drive down the weed numbers the best way we can.

“I’m going to collect seeds out the back of headers this year by placing them in rows on our tramlines.

“The aim is to collect the weed seeds and handle them separately next season and we’re trying to use as many different approaches as we can to reduce their impact.”

This includes the introduction of GM canola into the production system.

Their inland property has National Variety Trials (NVT) for canola, which has seen Triazine Tolerant (TT), Clearfield and Genetically Modified varieties planted.

Kalyx Agriculture is running these trials with funding from the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC).

“We always wait until the end of the season to determine the trial’s performance, so it’s still too early to determine what if any varieties are performing well this season,” Mr Fetherstonhaugh said.

“We try and pick out the best ones and start using them as quickly as we can and I’ve already introduced some new varieties onto our place from other trials in the local area.

“We go through as many trials as we can, quickly picking out the crops which have a yield advantage and are suited to this environment.”

This is the first year GM canola has been grown on the Munglinup property and it’s being used purely as a weed control strategy.

“We are trying to get on top of ryegrass and we see this as another way of attacking it,” he said.

“I see the need to have a balance between TT and GM canola in our production system and this year we only have Clearfield and GM canola hybrids.

“Next year on another block which is a little drier, we’ll be back to TT canola, while on our wetter coastal block, we expect to plant one of the Roundup Ready varieties next year.”

Mr Fetherstonhaugh does have his doubts as to whether the RR canola will out yield the TT canola varieties and expects them to be similar to the Clearfield hybrid varieties.

He sees the major benefit of GM varieties is the ability to have another group of chemicals to control ryegrass resistance in his crop.

“We do have the advantage of being able to knock over the grasses with roundup and this is our primary aim in using the GM canola,” he said.

“We aim to keep rotating between the different chemicals and not sticking to the one chemical all the time, by attacking the weeds from a different angle each year and hopefully staying in front with a bit of luck.”

The Esperance district producer is keen for further research to be undertaken into varieties and other production issues.

“I see research into varieties is critical and the Esperance zone is very quick to take on new varieties,” Mr Fetherstonhaugh said.

“It’s based mostly around the GRDC trials and often from the GRDC trials the top performers are picked out of that and then the South East Premium Wheat Growers Association take up the top four performers and put them on farmer trials.

“We then get the best commercially viable varieties for our local area.”

* For more information, visit www.grdc.com.au