THE lack of acknowledgement by the State government that WA farmers were leading the world in the capture of carbon and reduction of inputs affecting the environment has been slammed by Darkan farmers David and Ray Harrington.
The Harrington brothers said recently that the catch cry of the moment - "regenerative ag" and "carbon sequestration", which were being pushed by State Agriculture and Food Minister Alannah MacTiernan, "does our heads in" because almost 100 per cent of WA croppers were using the no-till system, which they championed since the early 1990s.
"This mob that's trying to make us carbon neutral," David said.
"They should know, that way back when we started we had nothing in the ground - no carbon whatsoever, and it's just grown and grown and grown.
"Our seeding into the stubble - all that stuff that's under there - we don't get paid for that, yet in the early days of WANTFA (WA No-Tillage Farming Association) the government said they would pay us x amount of dollars for carbon.
"We haven't seen a cent.
"Now city folk are telling us to go carbon neutral.
"As far as I am concerned those living in the city are polluting more than the rest of us in WA.
"The first thing they have got to do is park the car in the garage and turn the mains switch off and walk to the school and shops."
"We have been in regenerative agriculture - and it pis.... me off when I hear about this regen ag," Ray said.
"I've been doing it since 1980.
"Why can't they recognise just how much we have improved the State since the 1980s?
"You look at the one pass system - compared to the amount of fuel we used to burn, to the organic matter that goes in, to the organic carbon that we are able to retain."
He said through no-till they could conserve limited moisture, stop soil erosion and retain soil cover year round which in turn supplies a food source for the soil.
"It significantly reduces fossil fuel use, significantly reduces the machinery requirements on farm, which in turn reduces the CO2 emissions in the manufacture of machinery," Ray said.
"The soil bugs have had cover all summer and the roots of the previous crop are retained in the soil which increases the biomass.
"If we (WA) hadn't changed (to no-till) we wouldn't have got a one million tonne (harvest) of grain in the past three years."
"There would be no farmers in the Esperance area because they would all be blown away," David said.
"Regen ag is absolute crap - how are you going to make money from it?
"We can't reduce the amount of grain and stuff produced in the world now because there's more and more people to feed.
"It's like what my dad told me - we are here to feed Australia and the world."
Ray said if they were still using conventional cropping methods, it would have been a disaster this year with so much rain on the farm.
"They say each time you work the ground you lose 75 points of rain - in the past five years we didn't have 75 points to use," he said.
"Imagine what it would have been like this year?"
David said in the past when it had rained it washed a lot of the top soil away, but that hadn't happened so much using no-till.
"We had 347 millimetres this year - since January 23," Ray said.
"That's what we got for the whole of last year.
"This is the most I have ever seen green feed since 1961.
"This is my 57th crop (he was still at school at New Norcia in 1961).
"Dad said we had better build an arc because it rained for 30 days and 30 nights - everything was bogged."
"This year I said to the boys this is no different to what it was in 1961," David said.
"There's sufficient moisture in there to keep the crops going for about a month and a half and then all we need is another 20-30-40mm and then another 20-30-40mm and it will be a bouncer of a year."
Ray said they had just completed seeding 2000 hectares of crop for the year.
They used to only do 200 acres - but they also ran a large sheep operation back then with more than 24,000 Merino sheep.
"If we had ripped it up like we did in the old days this year we would have lost half the country," David said.
Efforts to share their research and development on no-till farming began in abut 1990 and on April 1, 1992, with the assistance of Department of Agriculture researcher Kevin Bligh "13 people came to the field day where we said that we had seeded this paddock".
Within months they had organised a meeting at Beverley where 30 farmers decided to form the no-till farming group.
Mr Bligh became secretary of WANTFA and made a massive contribution to the association until his death in 2018.
"In the meantime we had won a $3000 grant for landcare because of what we had done - it was a Federal government grant - but we had to do something positive with this money," David said.
"So we decided that we would give that to WANTFA.
"They had no money and $3000 was a lot of money back then."
Ray was later asked to do a field day at Corrigin where about 90-100 people turned up and "it just went from there".
Ray said Steve King, Lake Grace, who died in 2013, had been in the audience at Corrigin.
Mr King called Geoff Glenn, Collie, and said "go and find those two boys - I want that".
"Steve put a lot of crops in, about 15,000 acres in those days," Ray said.
"He had a block at Lake King and a block at Lake Grace.
"We said, Steve, just do a couple of hundred acres.
"He rang up again and said make me another set of points - he did 15,000 acres in one year."
Mr King went on to be a staunch advocate for no-till farming.
"We learned from that to not stop, just put it in the ground," Ray said.
"Now there's blokes up north that start seeding about April 15 - just stick it in and you get a shower of rain (away it goes).
"It's the evolution that's taken place - all the new technologies that are coming in because of it which makes that possible."
Ray said while no till was beginning to develop in WA during the 1990s it had taken root in other places such as the United States and Canada at the same time.
This was due to the development and availability of herbicides as well as suitable machinery.
He said today, the US was still only partly no-till while Australia was about 95pc.
David said the recent rains had provided a soil profile with moisture down as far as 200mm plus.
"Only dug at 100mm with the point - that's how much moisture was in the ground," he said.
"There's technology out there now where blokes are actually sowing on last year's row."
He said they originally sowed lupins north to south in 18 inch rows.
"Our cereals are all on east-west nine inch rows," he said
"We had a dry start and I went out and looked at the nine inch rows and thought it's not coming up and then I looked the other way and the barley had come up on 18 inch rows in the other direction.
"Everytime it crossed the row it came up.
"Then at harvest time, 1998-99, I went and dug up between the rows and I could have reused the seed that was sitting in between.
"That's when we started looking at the root structure as a vegetable, so it holds the water, whereas this gravel country doesn't hold the water."
Even though Ray was championing no-till all around the world he was not 100pc cropping.
"I had been in no-till for so long and I was only running 30pc crop," he said.
He made the decision to total crop in 1994 but had to do something about herbicide resistance which he had known about for 20 years.
"I was going total cropping but there were guys that had been doing it for years - wheat and lupin rotation was utopia, until it fell over," Ray said.
"I'm not smarter than them but I thought I would be in trouble if I didn't do something about herbicide resistance."
That was the beginning of his 25 year journey to develop the Seed Destructor.
"C for chaff became my modus operandi," Ray said.
"I was going to catch it, cook it, cart it, crush it or cremate it."
He thought about microwaving the seeds but they didn't have enough moisture content and then he went onto putting them through a hammer mill but Macco Feeds said it wouldn't work because there was too much variation from powder to full seed.
It was then that a collaboration came about between Ray, Geoff and Mike Glenn, Collie and Mr King, Lake Grace.
"Geoff called me and told me he thought he had what I needed," Ray said.
It was a cage mill that was rendering coal to make barbecue bricketts.
"When Geoff lifted the top off it I thought nothing was going to live in there," he said.
The principle of the mill was what was used in the Seed Destructor.
"Geoff made the first mill and they did a whole lot of testing in Collie with bird seeds and all sorts of stuff," he said.
Due to a mining boom his qualified staff left and were replaced by robotics, which forced him to discontinue the project because they had no expertise.
"Geoff gave me the mill and it sat out there for five years (by the shed)," Ray said.
It was then that he met University of WA professor Stephen Powells, who was recently recognised as the global authority on herbicide resistance.
Ray was able to win his support and professor Powells and colleague Michael Walsh were on board with a $20,000 injection into the project "to take the mill and get it coupled to the header".
"That was the start of the Seed Destructor project that took 25 years," he said.
Working with Ron Knapp, Kojonup, he built the prototype.
They used the $20,000 to get the mill behind the header.
They had one CASE IH header doing hours and hours of testing using dyed rye grass seed.
They would introduce some into the front of the header and some direct into the mill.
They would catch the product as it came out the mill and go away and count it all at UWA.
A partnership between Ray and professor Powells was entered into with a handshake and professor Powells put an application in for funding from the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) to further the project.
Funding was approved within six weeks to build the first Seed Destructor.
"The late Don Hair, from CGF, and I collaborated in building the first commercial prototype and modified the home-made one as well - so we had two Case headers fitted out," Ray said.
He said in the latest Seed Destructors on the market the "principle is there but it's changed - it's the evolution of everything".
The Seed Destructor works by using a cage mill that beats the weed seeds to death.
Ray said the technology came from Steadman in the US and was 100-years-old.
He said the Seed Destructor was just one in a whole raft of tools to control weeds, such as row burning, chaff carts, seed capture and destruction.
"We just went down that different path," he said.
"The plough was failing because you buried the weed seed too deep and they would come up after the crop came up.
"That meant you had to use the plough once or twice.
"We became aware of herbicide resistance.
"I thought, why don't I kill the weed seeds?
"Why don't we attack it in a different part of the weed's life cycle?"
The evolution came - the internal destructor - in 2008 when he made an agreement with the GRDC.
"Part of that agreement is they will take the technology that I developed and they would employ a third party to take it from a trail behind to integrate it," he said.
"The third party, University of SA engineering division, changed it from a contra rotating mill to a rota and a stata and went from 1400 revolutions to 3000 revs to get the same impact and that's how it changed to fit it into the header.
"The GRDC owns the licence - I gave them my IP for a royalty and they call the shots on who produces it etc.
"GRDC not only funded the development of the Seed Destructor as well as the harvest weed seed control systems that Powells and Walsh were researching."
Currently DeBruin, Mt Gambier, South Australia, manufactures the Seed Destructor.
David said the problem with coming up with ideas was you only got a year to think of something and "you only get the year to see if it's good or not".
"It's not continuous improvement, it's annual," Ray said.
"You dream all year about what you need to do, do it and then you get into harvest and two days later you think, oh no," David said.
"We did the hard yards with the R&D.
"We have always found that when you change from one system to another it takes about three years to get it how you need it.
"You have to plan ahead for that -that's what we found anyway."
Ray said he was semi-retired but in the next 10 years he was going to retire and the industry would keep evolving without him.
"I enjoy what I am doing - I have been so privileged over the past 30 years to work with David to develop the farm equipment," he said.
"To work with engineers, scientists, and marketers.
"It's been really enjoyable travelling the world.
"I've been to places all over the world with Dr Walsh doing presentations on harvest weed seed management.
"I just won a Syngenta trip to see some trials in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Europe.
"It's been a thoroughly enjoyable, rewarding experience, aside from farming, all on the back of having a go.
"The thing is we never developed something unless we needed it.
"Our mother used to say, 'necessity is the mother of invention'."
"It's up to the next generation," David said.
"The older generation has the knowledge and you've got to get it out of their head and into their heads."
While Ray was recently recognised by the Royal Agricultural Society of WA with a Lifetime Achievement Award, admitted to the Hall of Fame and had also been awarded an Order of Australia medal for his contribution to agriculture, David felt like there was little recognition for what he had done to help improve the industry over the years.
"You don't get any credit really for what you have done," David said.
"But last year I had two cockies from out east ring me up and say thanks for what we had done all those years ago, because they would never have got a crop out there the last few years without no-till.
"After going to Esperance and just looking at all the no-till crops from Esperance to Darkan that's going on you think 'I helped do that'.
"That's the satisfying thing about it.
"If it hadn't been for no-till there wouldn't be any farmers down there because they would have gotten blown away (by soil erosion).
"They are growing six tonne plus crops down there.
"That's the satisfaction we get - of just seeing what people are doing."
Ray said he also had the odd moment of recognition from a local farmer.
He was stopped at the boomgates waiting for a train to pass when he had a tap on the window and he thought he was going to get an ear full but it was the driver from the car behind who recognised him with the no-till number plates and politely said 'if it wasn't for you I'd have no crop at all' and he disappeared.
He said the driver had Newdegate number plates.
