BEVERLEY grower Adam Smith has passed the halfway point of his seeding program and with all things going to plan, will be finished next week.
Adam, wife Bec and parents Richard and Di have received about 230 millimetres on their mixed-cropping farm this year, with most of it falling over two summer rain events.
Up to 24mm of rain had fallen within 10 days to Monday, setting up a promising season.
“We had some excellent rain over the weekend – about 13mm – which has given us a brilliant start,” Adam said.
“It’s not often we go into seeding with a full moisture profile, so that’s a pretty good start.
“We started out seeding feeling pretty confident, the only worry was the lack of rain on the horizon, but it’s always pretty variable at this time of the year.”
The Smiths’ cropping program is split into thirds and planted to canola, barley and wheat.
After an April 28 start the team finished its canola program and was sowing Cobra variety wheat when Farm Weekly dropped by last week.
“We would have probably liked to put a bit more canola in this year, but we don’t want to push it past 30 per cent,” Adam said.
“We’ve been mixing it up with a bit of barley and a bit of wheat, chopping and changing between the two for the past 10 days or so.”
The Smiths’ canola program is made up of genetically modified and TT varieties and was already out of the ground in parts last week.
“Some of it is out, we’ve had a little bit of a patchy germination but after this rain it will be up and away and even up fairly nicely,” Adam said.
Bass, Latrobe and Spartacus were the barley varieties of choice, while Cobra variety was in the mix for the wheat, along with Trojan which was being trialled on the farm for the first time.
“Trojan is new this year, we’ve just got a small amount to try that out,’’ he said.
“We wanted something a little bit longer, a mid-season to put in a little bit earlier.”
Adam said the team had been aiming to sow 90 to 100 hectares per day to complete the whole seeding program within a month.