TOM BROWN has only given serious thought to selling his 4550 hectare Esperance property once during his life-long career as a farmer.
It was in 2008 when his mixed grain and sheep farm, Hill Plains near Beaumont, suffered a bad year with very little rain leading to his 3000 ewes struggling to find any pasture to feed on.
"We got 10.6 millimetres of rain in June and after that, due to grazing pressure, the pastures literally disappeared back into the ground," Mr Brown said.
"We had to swing immediately into high volumes of cereal grain feeding as our ewes' only source of food was when that sheep feeder turned up.
"You'd see them running to the sheep feeder from all over the paddock, leaving their lambs behind and it was just devastating."
With a very poor lambing percentage as a result, Mr Brown made the decision to get rid of his sheep and make the farm 100 per cent cropping at the end of 2008.
"We had a massive financial loss with our livestock and on top of that a very wet harvest," Mr Brown said.
"All of the grain was feed and all of the wheat sprouted so it was just a shocking year all up.
"If crops are struggling, it's not the same kind of emotional drag and stress on you as livestock."
Luckily a good season followed in 2009, which abated all of Mr Brown's concerns and worries and it put his farming enterprise back on track.
"I've come to the conclusion that the only time you make money in grain farming is between the time you put the seed in the ground and the time you take it off," Mr Brown said.
"Everything else is time you should be relaxing."
A second-generation farmer, Tom's father, John Brown, had no farming experience when he acquired a soldier settlement block in Finley, New South Wales and began farming in the mid 1950s.
A couple of years later John took an opportunity to purchase land in Esperance and moved the family over to Western Australia.
"The original family farm was one of the first farms in Esperance, so as I was growing up if we ever heard a car it was coming to us," Mr Brown said.
"Many people would come out to see what dad was doing on the farm and he also did contract work, helping others to develop their own blocks."
Splitting from a partnership with his parents in the 1980s, Mr Brown took a few thousand sheep with him and ended up clearing most of his portion of the property, making it a first-generation farm.
Gradually he built up his flock of sheep to about 10,000 head, with the livestock side of his operation peaking at 350 bales of wool in one year.
Over the years he has also added more hectares to the property, all of which adjoins the original farm.
In terms of the farm's crops, Mr Brown grew peas for several years before switching that portion of the property over to canola.
"It's hard work to get the peas up and you end up leaving a lot of the crop on the ground, so our cropping rotation now consists of one third wheat, one third barley and one third canola," Mr Brown said.
At the time of writing, the farm had received 318mm of rain for the year, which was in front of last year's total and a little behind the year before that.
"At the end of July my wheat looked dreadful and I was all set to pack the boat and vehicle up and head north but then it started raining in August," Mr Brown said.
"August has been our savior three years in a row.
"This year we tipped out 103mm for August, last year we got 80mm and the year before we got 120mm and that was water log conditions, but we still grew our best ever crop off that."
After suffering a bad frost last year, the farm's wheat crop went in last this year, which is all Scepter.
Due to the potentially destructive Russian wheat aphid being found on two farms in the district in August (the first time the pest has ever been found in WA), Mr Brown said he had acquired enough chemical to treat his seed for next year.
Despite a bit of Black Leg appearing on the pods of his Bonito canola, he said the farm was looking at one of its better canola crops this year.
"We started dry seeding canola in front of a rain forecast in mid-April, which we got 15mm out of, so it germinated quite nicely," Mr Brown said.
InVigor T 4510 and Trophy make up the rest of the canola crop.
"This year I changed our rotations a little bit, taking one paddock of barley out due to China locking us out of their premium market," Mr Brown said.
Also switching from La Trobe to Planet barley this year, Mr Brown said he had been surprised at how tolerant the Planet variety was to boron toxicity, common in the area.
He estimated his barley crop will yield about 5 tonne per hectare this year - the highest average the farm has ever produced.
Despite this, continued concern around the impact of COVID-19 on Australia's barley export markets has made Mr Brown question whether he will continue to plant the grain.
"I know work is being done by the Australian Government and private enterprise on emerging export markets such as India, but I'm still not convinced there will be much demand for our barley in the years to come," Mr Brown said.
"The Prime Minister has told us it's going to be a poorer, more dangerous place to live in after COVID and if it's going to be poorer people aren't going to be eating as much meat, and if meat consumption decreases, feed barley isn't going to be needed as much.
"If you look politically around the world, how much longer is livestock going to be part of the food chain of the world population?
"Veganism is everywhere.
"The Greens are growing in stature and as they infiltrate all political parties I start to wonder how long livestock is going to be a major source of agricultural production."
Mr Brown is considering beans or lentils as a replacement crop.
With three full-time workers during the year (including Mr Brown), except during seeding and harvest time when there are four and six workers (respectively), he expects to start harvesting in mid to late October.
He is also considering increasing the number of his workers to three full-timers in the off-season so he can decrease his own workload.
"As a farmer, I've always felt that I need to be an intensive part of the operations to justify my income," Mr Brown said.
"If I think the tractor should be doing more hours in a day then I will get out that night and keep it ticking along so that the job happens in opportune time.
"But looking to the future I think I probably have five or so years left on the farm."
When asked if he thinks he will miss agriculture once he sells or leases the farm, Mr Brown responds by saying farming is all he's ever known.
"Other than travelling around Australia for five months when I was 19, farming has been my life since I was 15," he said.
"I would like to think that I look at this farm as a business, purely.
"I still enjoy trying to make a crop grow better and, while I'm here, I'm still very committed to it.
"I love that time sitting in the sprayer when you don't have to concentrate on steering the machine anymore, and I can just sit back and think about how my crop is growing.
"But it will also be very pleasant not having to drive up the road to our farm, heading north and seeing how much the rain fall has decreased by the amount of dust the vehicle is kicking up behind us.
"That part of it I won't miss."
