AFTER meeting her farmer partner, Lucy Hall left her high-flying corporate career to return to the world of agriculture in 2018.
Having grown up on a cattle and sheep farm at Manypeaks, Ms Hall spent most of her adult life working in a variety of corporate roles in Perth and Melbourne, including as senior portfolio manager with PwC Melbourne, a business solutions specialist for AustralianSuper and a pursuit manager for KPMG.
However it was a campaign manager role with the Royal Flying Doctor Service WA that prompted Ms Hall's return to Perth in 2015, where she also went on to become a pursuit coach for PwC Perth before meeting her partner, Simon Humphris.
Soon after their relationship began, Ms Hall decided to uproot her life and move to his cropping and sheep farm at Arthur River, in the Great Southern region.
Acknowledging that the move to the farm had been quite the transition, she was able to transfer her knowledge and skills from her previous corporate roles to life on the farm.
"I also chair Rural Edge Australia which provides professional development and training for the betterment of farming businesses, so I've been able to apply that experience in agribusiness and bring a different perspective to our own farming operations," Ms Hall said.
With harvest now underway at their 2500 hectare cropping and sheep farm, she said the season was shaping up well, despite hitting a few small snags along the way, with one of their two headers having hydraulic issues last week.
With the farms cropping rotation consisting of canola, barley and a few hectares of lupins thrown in as sheep feed for their Merino and White Suffolks, harvest is expected to be finished before Christmas.
"The season was a bit slow to start with and we are probably a few days behind a normal year, but Simon doesn't have a stop button so I think we are about a third of the way through now," Ms Hall said.
"We were just really lucky that the rains that came through the region recently didn't affect us - the clouds just circled around the farm.
"We got a pretty amazing finish and this season we have been topped up with rain at the right time."
Having received 517 millimetres of rain for the year, the farm's water tanks and dams are all full and because they had so much healthy pasture, they have purchased in additional ewes.
"This is our second year of growing lupins for our sheep feed, so when we wean the lambs we put them onto the lupin crops and that's been working really well," Ms Hall said.
Today the farm is about 60 per cent cropping and 40pc sheep.
"While sheep are resource intensive, we think it's important to have two sources of income so that we've covered ourselves if we run into an average year with our crops," Ms Hall said.
"They also help with our weed control."
The farm has about 120 rams and 3500 ewes.
"We choose to run Merinos because they're good mothers and their lambing percentages are usually quite good and the White Suffolk cross gives us good meat production too," Ms Hall said.
She said the lambing percentage, usually about 110 per cent, was down a bit this year, which she attributed to the cold and wet weather.
Usually mated in February and March, lambing takes place in mid July.
They have increased the amount of GM canola this year, planting TT, which is alongside a program of Planet and Spartacus barley, with average yields of 2.2 tonnes her hectare so far.
"Due to the wind some of our canola flattened down, so it has been a bit slow going as we have to put the header front down low to the ground," Ms Hall said.
"So we haven't started on our barley yet, but that's also looking good."
Wheat was eliminated from the program this year due to its frost susceptibility.
Mr Humphris is a third-generation farmer who does most of the outside jobs while Lucy helps out with the office work, picking up machinery parts, driving the header and doing sheep work when it's busy.
They secured a backpacker from Estonia who works for them full-time, helping out with anything and everything around the farm.
Having always relied on backpackers, the farm previously employed a worker from Germany who had to return home when COVID-19 restrictions hit.
"He would like to come back and we would like to sponsor him so that he can get his residency, but it's an expensive exercise where he'll have to jump through a lot of hoops and the pandemic has just added another layer of difficulty in that process," Ms Hall said.
She said it was hard to attract workers to the region and that the concept of on-the-job training helped agriculture students achieve their degree or certification, which was a good way to attract and retain more skilled workers.
"I think labour is always going to be an issue in our sector so we need to, at both a corporate and a government level, promote the regions better and the way of life out here," Ms Hall said.
Reflecting on her decision to move back to the country, Ms Hall was thankful for the sense of community in the regions and the freedom of running their own business.
"It is lovely having all of the space around you and everyone seems to have each other's back living in the country," Ms Hall said.
"I also love that I can have a lot of animals around me here - we have three chooks, a duck, two cats, a Labrador puppy and four kelpies.
"We feel pretty lucky."
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