WHEN the Australian wool market crashed in 1991, Esperance farmer Andrew Middleton picked up 4000-head of sheep for "literally nothing".
The deal was simple: Take the whole mob, don't just draft the good ones.
At the time, Mr Middleton was running his own 12,500-head flock of fine wool Merino sheep at Oake Marsh Farm, Merivale.
Growing up in England, his parents had purchased the farm - formerly known as John's Block (part of the Beef Machine empire) - in October 1987, with a deposit of traveller's cheques.
Farmland was affordable (under $200 per acre), the wool industry was profitable (with the reserve price rising to 870 cents per kilogram) and there were greater opportunities in Australia's agricultural industry compared to the United Kingdom.
Never did the Middletons imagine that by 1992, the wool market would crash and the government would be paying indebted farmers two dollars per sheep shot.
Running a 100pc sheep operation with no crop, a massive debt and 20pc interest rates, Mr Middleton was "hanging onto the farm by the skin of his teeth".
"We were certainly under a lot of pressure," Mr Middleton said.
"You literally could not get rid of sheep - you couldn't give them away.
"They actually locked the gates at the abattoir to stop people unloading sheep - it was that bad."
Facing such difficult and uncertain times, anyone would ask Mr Middleton: Why take on a few extra thousand worthless sheep?
Well, with 2000 tonnes of silage on hand he said "the writing was on the wall".
And the silage proved to play a crucial role in keeping the animals alive.
"Prior to the crash I was mating 5000 ewes a year, but I didn't mate any sheep that year because I could see what was happening," Mr Middleton said.
"At the end of spring people were trying to offload sheep into the summer and couldn't.
"So I went to about three farms and took all the sheep they had for sale
"Then when the government started paying us to kill them, I drafted off all the limpy and crummy sheep and kept the good ones.
"Over the summer I was able to feed them the fermented silage."
Silage is grass or other green fodder compacted and stored in airtight conditions, without first being dried.
In layman's terms it is: pickled pasture.
"Through the spring we need to conserve forage to feed the sheep," Mr Middleton said.
"There's two ways of doing it - hay or silage.
"The start of the silage process is basically the same as hay, you can use an oat crop - the same as hay - or you can use pasture."
Much like hay, silage is cut.
However, instead of leaving it on the ground to completely dry out it is only allowed to wilt for 24 hours.
It is then picked up with a machine, put through a chopper, blown into a truck and brought back to a central point onfarm, where it is compacted into a bunker and sealed with polythene.
Sealing the silage keeps the air out, which helps it to pickle, ferment and create lactic acid.
This allows it to retain more nutrients and be stored for 10 years or more.
"We mainly make pasture silage, but we have also made crop silage," Mr Middleton said.
"You don't lose all those soluble vitamins and minerals that get lost in the hay process and you don't have that leaf shatter or dust.
"It is only on the ground for literally 24-48 hours and then it ends up in the pit.
"You preserve more of the crop and end up with a higher feed value material at the end of it."
With the silage on hand, Mr Middleton was able to run the sheep for four months in a feedlot area until the market started to turn around.
He found the benefits of silage to be:
- In most circumstances it preserved more of the plant nutrients compared to hay.
- It keeps for 10 years or more, as long as it is sealed with very low losses.
- Hay can start to lose a significant amount of value if kept for more than one year, unless well covered or kept in a shed.
- Silage does not transfer weeds from paddock-to-paddock like hay can, as all seeds are killed in the fermentation process. This controls resistant ryegrass in a crop.
- As the whole process of cutting to ensile only takes two to three days, there is far less risk of it being soiled by bad weather.
That is compared to hay, which can take up to two weeks or more on the South Coast and will invariably get some rain on it in that time.
Additional income was made using a front end loader to dig holes for burying sheep that farmers in the area had been forced to shoot.
"I was making money contract digging holes - it wasn't a nice job, but I was desperate for money," Mr Middleton said.
"I was working for one dollar an hour, paying myself $100 a week for food and working 100 hours a week to keep everything together.
"I had 15,000 to 16,000 sheep to look after.
"I eventually sold quite a lot of those bought in sheep for $20 per head.
"It wasn't much but when you got them for nothing it was a profit."
Mr Middleton also used a sharecropper for a few years.
He needed to increase cash flow and diversify his risk, so cropping seemed a viable option.
However, after the wool depression he was so broke he couldn't afford to buy anything.
"I was battling to buy a shovel, let alone a tractor or seeder,'' he said.
"It worked but I felt we were giving a fair bit away.
"So in 1996 I teamed up with my neighbours Ian and Wendy Duncan to buy machinery and set up a share arrangement plus some contract cropping to further increase cash flow.
"We would go seeding between his property and mine - we did that for about three years."
Then in 1999, the Integrated Tree Cropping (ITC) was looking for land to lease for blue gum plantations under a management investment scheme.
The company targeted the Esperance area given the high average rainfall of 500 millimetres.
As part of the scheme investors put money in and landholders were paid a lease.
Having hit rock bottom, it was an opportunity too good to refuse for Mr Middleton, particularly given he was still struggling with high interest rates and low returns.
1999 was a "very wet year" with 740mm rainfall recorded and nothing was made from the crops.
"My neighbour decided it was a good option for him and put his whole farm into blue gum trees - basically retiring from farming and got a job with ITC," Mr Middleton said.
"But I wasn't ready to give up farming, so I set it up in alleys and effectively converted a bit over a third of the farm into trees.
"We divided all of the paddocks into thirds and into strips, so a lot of them were half trees, half pasture.
"An added bonus was that they could also be used as a wind break for the animals."
The blue gums provided a steady source of income and lease payments were linked to CPI.
Mr Middleton was contract spraying and was also paid to help ITC with tree establishment.
He planted 560,000 blue gums across 700ha at his Oake Marsh Farm between 1999-2001.
With a large amount of land (about 50,000ha in total) going into trees in Esperance up to five people were employed to run up to six sprayers between 2000 to 2010.
But just as life seemed to be on the upward turn, the global financial crisis hit in 2008.
This caused the management schemes to fall over and left landowners with dead assets.
By that time ITC had become Elders Forestry.
"When that fell over we no longer had any lease income, but within a year we ended up gaining ownership of the trees," Mr Middleton said.
"Part of the lease contract was that if they failed to pay two consecutive lease payments then the trees would be reverted to ownership.
"However, we weren't sure they were going to have any value or if we were going to get them harvested."
Mr Middleton wanted to see the trees utilised instead of destroyed and in 2014, the first 130ha of plantations were harvested through a Queensland-based contractor.
The company harvested the trees, chipped them, carted them to port and the woodchips were exported to China.
But unfortunately Mr Middleton's money went with it and he received only a small portion of what was owed.
It was another huge financial blow for the farmer because he then had to borrow money to clear the land and get it back into production.
Despite a number of setbacks, the final harvest of the blue gum plantations is scheduled for next year.
Contractors were at Oake Marsh from July to September this year, falling and chipping 100ha of blue gums to be exported and used for high grade copy paper.
To be processed efficiently, trees have to be a certain size and length, fairly clean stemmed, without too many branches and no leaves or bark.
A machine cleans all of the leaves and bark off the tree and only the stem is chipped.
There also cannot be cross contamination with other trees as it impacts the quality of the paper.
"It is a bit like wool harvesting -- you don't mix types of wool," Mr Middleton said.
"You would never put a crossbred fleece in with a Merino."
Given the demand for their services, contractors spend 60 days at each property for harvest.
Two hectares of blue gums are harvested a day.
"We are left with 110-120ha, which will hopefully be harvested next year," Mr Middleton said.
"There's a lot of work cleaning up after harvest, so I wouldn't want it all done in one go because then it would get away from me.
"I wouldn't be able to clean it all up and get the stumps ground down before the regrowth started to get away."
In the future, Mr Middleton hopes to reclaim some of the regrowth areas from an earlier blue gum harvest - which aren't suitable for paper - for biofuel.
As well as blue gum plantations, Oake Marsh Farm runs sheep, cattle and cropping.
Sheep numbers have reduced to just under 2000 fine wool Merino ewes, which this year were mated to crossbred white and black face Suffolks.
Usually two thirds are mated to Merinos and one third to crossbreds.
Mr Middleton decided to go the other way in breeding given the price and the fact he didn't need to increase ewe numbers.
Wether lambs are kept to produce wool for between 1.5 to 2.5 years before they are sent off for live export.
When the ewes are too old to breed they are sold as mutton and the crossbred lambs are reared to a saleable weight, before they are sold either direct to processors or to the Katanning saleyard.
Mr Middleton said once all of the blue gums were gone, he would look at expanding his flock.
He also runs 42 cows - mainly Angus and some Gelbvieh - and plans to introduce 11 heifers to his herd next year.
Most of the heifer calves are kept as replacements and put into the breeding herd, while the steers are held onto for eight to 10 months and then moved onto a feedlot or the Mt Barker saleyards.
Cattle spend about nine months in Tagasaste hedge rows, which are nitrogen-fixing and provide shelter in both warm and cold weather conditions.
Before the Tagasaste was planted, the paddocks were gutless, white, non-wetting sand with nothing but capeweed and silver grass.
Today, they are some of the most productive paddocks at Oake Marsh Farm.
Mr Middleton established pastures on the sandplain in the early 2000s, while "digging himself out of the hole" of the wool market crash.
The Kirwan brothers - who pioneered the farmland in the early 50s before selling it to Beef Machine in 1972 - had started planting kikuyu in the soil.
So Mr Middleton planted more to help hold the sand together.
Cropping only takes up 200ha of his operation today, with 130ha of canola and 70ha of barley, with 40ha of new pastures including clover, serradella and ryegrass.
"I planted serradella underneath my barley crop and grazed it two to three times over before it went to head," Mr Middleton said.
"The animals had an enormous benefit from it and we also got the grain at the end.
"Grazing crops are becoming more common, particularly on the coast where there is high rainfall.
"I've literally pulled the cows out of a barley crop this morning, put another 80 kilograms of urea on it and away we will go again."
Last year, 65ha of canola was grazed using 1000 lambs and 40 cows with calves at foot for a month.
Canola and barley are put in the ground as early as possible with the intention of grazing to fill the autumn feed gap.
"It worked well last year, but with the rainfall this year they got a bit wet and because of the early break we had enough pasture.
"We did seed some barley into pasture paddocks purely for grazing, which we will cut for silage."
Mr Middleton's focus this year has been cropping the harvested tree country, after the area has been cleaned up and the stumps have been ground.
As well as running the farm, Mr Middleton has been kept busy with contract work - mainly hay - but also spraying for neighbours.
He has found diversity to be the key in securing a reliable income and contracting has helped justify having a full-time employee hired at Oake Marsh.
If you were to ask Mr Middleton what kept him going through the tough times, including the wool market crash and blue gum plantation saga his answer would be: "I knew if I lost the opportunity there may not be another."
And what does Mr Middleton love most about agriculture and farming?
"There are a lot of things I love about agriculture - working outside gives you a greater appreciation of nature," he said.
"But also the variety of work is one of the best features of working on a farm.
"We rear and work livestock, there is the agronomy and science in producing pastures and crops and then operating all the various pieces of machinery to make it work.
"Last, but not least, there is also the repair and maintenance of machines and infrastructure to keep it working.
"I like the fact we produce tangible and valuable products that the world needs, efficiently and sustainably."
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