THE old saying is ‘Roll on New Year’s Eve’.
It’s usually uttered when the season is giving you a beating and you just want the year to end.
It can be especially harrowing when the media is trumpeting a bonanza season for your peers.
To really stick it in, you watch hay trucks driving past your front gate heading east to help out drought-stricken farmers in New South Wales, while you’re planning to further de-stock because you’ve run out of feed for your ewe flock (after spending your entire 2017 wool clip on hand-feeding).
And you don’t want to talk with the media because it just puts a negative on the district.
Well, south Jerramungup farmer Tony Griffiths, can say ‘amen’ to all of the above.
But watching the hay trucks was so galling he decided to contact this writer, as well as firing off a letter to Agriculture and Food Minister Alannah MacTiernan, on behalf of local farmers, seeking financial assistance to increase on-farm water storage capacities via water tanks, additional dams and catchments and to repair and maintain existing dams and catchments.
Even as the season deteriorated, farmers were still applying lime and gypsum but eight successive near-cyclonic wind events saw most of that entire product blown into Bremer Bay, along with a good portion of topsoil, which also buried fences.
It will be a year for the history books, recorded as the driest since 1963.
At this time of the year Mr Griffiths is usually carrying 3000 sheep.
This year he is down to 1500, including 800 breeding ewes, which are being joined this month before rams are taken out later this month.
Mr Griffiths can only hope for summer rain to fill dams while maintaining his flock on stubbles.
As for regenerating pastures, it’s a moot subject as summer wind events loom large in the mind.
His cropping area naturally was pulled back with 300 hectares of canola taken out of the program because it was too dry and 150ha of barley was fed off to nothing.
The only bright note is that 150ha of wheat might yield 1.5 tonnes a hectare.
“It was a cheap crop following canola and if we had got the rain, it potentially could have gone 3-4t/ha,” Mr Griffiths said.
“Ironically it was a year that had potential with a soft finish.
“We got 15 millimetres in May, 16mm in June, 30mm in July and 49mm in August but the crops on the red country didn’t germinate until August and with 4mm in September, they died.
“Our average rain is 430mm and by the end of October we had recorded 165mm.
“It would have been a different story if we had got some of that summer rain that fell in January.”
So what happens now?
“Well, we can’t carry the ewes through summer so I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to do,” Mr Griffiths said.
“At this stage I’d like to keep 400 ewes and crop canola, barley and wheat.
“I’ve already got the canola seed and it’s all treated and I’ve got enough wheat and barley seed so that’s a strategy at this stage.
“We’re hanging on by the finger nails but we’ll get the fences repaired, try to put in more dams and look at how we can get some of these paddocks going again.
“You always live in hope.”
That’s also the attitude of Richard Surridge, who farms 40 kilometres south of Mr Griffiths.
Mr Surridge hails from a family farm at Narrikup, which runs 130 red Angus breeders.
Part of the plan of Mr Surridge’s move to Jerramungup was to make hay for the Narrikup farm.
“It’s not all doom and gloom,” Mr Surridge said.
“When it rains we can produce good crops.
“This year where we got rain, our cereals are looking as though they might yield two tonnes but in paddocks that didn’t get enough, we’re down to probably 500 kilograms a hectare.
“And in a good year canola crops can yield between 1.5t/ha and 2t/ha.
“But when it doesn’t rain, like this year, we made the decision early to leave canola out and stick with barley, wheat, oats and lupins.”
Two weeks ago Ms Surridge harvested a paddock sown as a clover-barley mix for sheep feed, harvesting a ‘bonus’ 890kg/ha.
“The clover got blown away but the barley held in and we got about 70-80 per cent germination,” he said.
“We let it grow and then put the sheep on it for a month before we locked it away.
“In this district in a good year you make money and we’re definitely farming better, but it was lack of rain and big wind events that really hammered us this year.
“We had no pastures to feed the sheep until the end of August and we hand-fed from February to the end of July.
Ironically, Mr Surridge upped the pasture component this year from 118ha to 270ha, planting a mix of oats, serradella, clover, barley and vetch.
He is running 800 ewes and 841 lambs and is back to hand feeding every second day, despite a “tease” of 25mm of rain last month.
“It didn’t do anything to push the pastures and our eight dams are well below capacity,” Mr Surridge said.
But there remains instinctive energy to keep working.
After the wind events, he employed an 18.2 metre Kelly chain to level ‘lumpy’ paddocks and that will be a regular job from now on before seeding starts next year.
“You couldn’t drive over the paddocks after the wind events,” he said.
“Where we levelled we re-seeded to get some cover and fortunately we were able to get a bit of hay to feed the sheep.
“It’s a bit ironic that a wet September would have turned the year around for us because by the end of August the crops were looking OK despite the battering and lack of rain.
“The paddocks that blew the most were the cereals and pastures.”
Another irony for Mr Surridge was that in his first year on the farm, in 2016, he recorded 800mm of rain on the property, water-logging 25pc of his canola.
He also had to re-sow his barley crop in August and finished with a 1.5t/ha average.
“Oats went three tonnes but the price died,” Mr Surridge said.
But the rain also triggered a flush of clover and ryegrass resulting in “plump” lambs in October and enough feed for the heifers from Narrikup before mating.
“I thought I’d hit the jackpot coming up here,” he said.
With the hope of good years to come, maybe he has.
