RATHER than being given the label of regenerative, Kulin farmer Brendon Savage prefers to be called a sustainable hybrid farmer.
He is the first and only Western Australian farmer who currently has Australian Sustainable Produce (ASP) certification for his cropping and sheep farm, Tolga, situated about 30 kilometres south of Kulin.
Mr Savage said his farming operations combined the best of conventional and sustainable farming practices to promote healthy soils so he doesn't have to rely on large rates of synthetic fertilisers.
"We still use NPK, but we load it up with other products that are made here in WA to get the best efficiencies from our money and to promote soil health," Mr Savage said.
In order to be ASP certified, growers are required to conform to a standard that is fairly stringent on synthetic phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium inputs.
While the industry benchmark for nitrogen use sits at about 40-70 units, Mr Savage said most of his home farm was seeded with less than seven units of synthetic nitrogen.
"Insecticide and fungicide is only used where deemed absolutely necessary and no allowance for application post Zadocks 31 on certified paddocks," Mr Savage said.
"There are restrictions on some chemical groups and significant withholding periods.
"All paddocks that are to be certified are MRL tested to ensure they are chemical and pesticide residue free.
"If you are farming a short rotation with cereal on cereal rotations it would be very difficult to achieve accreditation."
Despite having only been ASP certified for a year, Mr Savage said he had been growing many of his crops to this standard for the past eight years.
"I was one of the initial three growers in Western Australia and then the group grew to the Eastern States, New Zealand and more recently we have a couple of liquid plants in the United States, with 50,000 hectares of land managed under the ASP farming system there," Mr Savage said.
As part of his pasture re-establishment, he has been using a rotation of tillage radish and subclover to provide a fodder source, as well as recycle nutrients, break up the hard pan and control the grasses on farms he has purchased in recent years.
As an export orientated State and with a much smaller population than that of the east coast, Mr Savage acknowledged that WA was a much harder place to sell a niche product, however he said it was still important to have points of difference.
"When I visit local brewers they pay up to $1800 per tonne for malt, which is pretty standard, so I'm guessing they should be able to pay that or more for malt that potentially has marketing advantages," Mr Savage said.
"Voyager Craft malt did a pilot in 2020 with our malt and it was given to Terrella Brewing and Stone & Wood Brewing Co.
"Some of the malt was turned into home brew kits for a bit of fun and they have been very well received.
"One keen home brewer with 30 years' experience in the game told me his wife never liked beer until she tried some of our brew kit."
At the time of writing Mr Savage was working with consultants to calculate the carbon footprint of his farm.
This season
A third-generation farmer, Mr Savage has been on the property, which is half cropping and half sheep, since 1977.
Tolga has 5200 arable hectares with 1480ha of Mundah and Spartacus barley, 1000ha of Bannister oats and 120ha of grazing wheat planted this year.
The property's average rainfall sits at about 340mm, but at the time of writing Mr Savage said various patches of the farm had received 425-450mm.
While somewhere between 10-20 per cent of the property was waterlogged, he said most of his crops still looked good.
"Things got very wet here early, so we were probably wetter than most earlier on and it's stayed ridiculously wet," Mr Savage said.
"But we have no complaints - whatever we get off the country that is not waterlogged will probably make up for the stuff that is."
Looking back at more than six years of data, Mr Savage said there had been a 600 kilogram difference between his wheat and barley crops due to the impact of frost, so for the past few years he hadn't grown wheat apart from a small portion that was trialled for grazing this year.
Selling a lot of barley into the domestic market, Mr Savage keeps his options open by storing the vast majority of grain on his farm.
"Spartacus barley has been very consistent for us and can go into feed or malt," Mr Savage said.
With the farming operation now evenly split between cropping and sheep, at one stage Tolga reached about 70pc cropping.
"By reducing the percentage of cropping in recent years and running what would be considered a much more conservative rotation, we have been able to use less fertiliser and chemical on our crops," Mr Savage said.
While more income is generated from the cropping side of his farming operations, Mr Savage said in a frost or dry year the net income from his livestock enterprise could easily outperform the crop.
"I think mixed farming is fantastic and I don't think you can't really quantify all of its benefits," he said.
"It doesn't matter how many cost analyses you do - you can't really factor in the exact value of weed control and organic N, there are just so many variables.
"As you go more into livestock, you get so much more value from your barley and oat stubbles than you do your wheat stubbles, so the synergy is also better."
The number of sheep on the farm peaks in August each year at about 8200, which is to take advantage of the feed surplus in September.
Mr Savage's ewe flock consists of 60pc maternal composites and 40pc Merinos.
He uses the Australian Soil Planners system to manage his sheep flock efficiencies.
"We have a full systems approach for the livestock with easy ways of confining sheep over February and March with straw and custom made licks," Mr Savage said.
"Added to this are winter nutrition packages that are designed to create feed efficiencies resulting in minimal or no scouring, which is just money out the back door."
More recently Mr Savage has used a dry feed lick designed to maximise stubble digestion and dry fibre utilisation.
Lamb marking was completed in mid July, with the maternal composites achieving a record result for the farm of 170pc and the Merino ewes achieving 114 percent.
At scanning, the dry ewes are remated and at the time of writing they were lambing along with a mob of composite ewe lambs.
With a strong focus on improving the farm's sheep feed efficiencies and management systems, Mr Savage said he had also participated in a project by Murdoch University focused on lamb survival and reducing mortality of triplet bearing ewes and their lambs for several years.
Belief in the ASP farming system
WHOLEGRAIN Milling Co owner and director Craig Neale, who has supplied Australian Sustainable Produce (ASP) certified flour to the east coast market for about 10 years, believes the ASP farming system creates a superior product.
The largest supplier of chemical-free, organic and sustainable flours in Australia, Wholegrain Milling Co. started trialling the sustainable flour, even before the ASP certification was fully authenticated.
"At the time, the demand for organic flour was exceeding supply on the east coast, so once I heard about the sustainable farming system some farmers were using, I thought 'gee that needs to be taken somewhere'," Mr Neale said.
"So we got the standard drawn up, through the parent company Southern Cross Agricultural Exports, and ASP is now fully audited by independent auditors and fully traceable, and the end result is a chemical free product."
Now utilising both organic and ASP flour, Mr Neale processes 5000-6000t of organic flour and about 12,000t of ASP flour a year.
Mr Neale said ASP flour had been outgrowing organic flour in terms of its "popularity and consistency" more recently.
"Our organic flour is actually on the decline unfortunately," Mr Neale said.
"It's probably down about 1500t on last year and that's largely due to price, as there isn't a shortage of it at the moment due to the seasons that we've had lately.
"But the ASP flour seems to be very favourable in terms of what consumers want.
"The ASP farming system creates grains that are definitely more nutrient dense and that have good quality protein."
Despite the term 'sustainable' having been bastardised by some people in the agricultural industry more recently, Mr Neil said he was confident in the future of sustainable products.
"We just need to have a bit of creativity and observation of where our consumers are at and in our marketing strategies, as many people are confused as to what it actually means for a product to be sustainable these days," Mr Neale said.
Wholegrain Milling Co. is working with Mauri Foods, which supplies bakery ingredients across Australia and New Zealand and is a division of George Weston Foods Australia.
"They haven't come out with a sustainable logo as yet, but they're distributing our product and they also own Tip Top so it is an ambition of ours to have our ASP flour in that product within the next three years," Mr Neale said.