SAVVY budgeting led Ben Tully to harvest his barley crop with a 587 Massey Ferguson header from the late 1960s.
Led by a desire to outlay as little cash as possible for his first barley crop, the Donnybrook farmer, placed an ad online, calling out for cheap harvesters.
"By the time I bought the 587 I already had the crop in the ground and was starting to get a bit desperate to work out how to get it off again," Mr Tully said.
"There were a couple of cheap ones online, but they were still a little bit more than I wanted to pay so I just put on a 'wanted to buy one cheap harvester' ad and some guy rang me up.
"He said he bought it to harvest some ryegrass seed but couldn't get it to go in the front but if I wanted to have a go at it, it's mine, so I bought it."
With the front cut down to eight feet, Mr Tully's harvest was about four tonnes per hectare, which he was happy with with given the first go and nutrition issues he had from farming on an old vegetable farm.
Under no time constraints, harvesting just a couple of hectares, Mr Tully said the sample was as clean as a whistle.
Mr Tully chose to plant Planet and Laperose barley, trying a few different options, to experiment with the quality parameters.
"I got the Laprose for nothing basically because it's going through it's malt accreditation," he said.
"The guy at Seednet said I could have it as a trial and let me know how it goes, it was only three bags of it, so it hasn't broken the bank, but he was interested in how it would go."
He also purchased a Connor Shea three point Linkage Seeder, from the same era as the Massey Ferguson, thanks to some more clever trading.
"A guy in Argyle had that, it's fairly similar vintage, it's got everything in pounds per acre still, so I had to do a bit of maths to make sure it was all going properly," he said.
Although Mr Tully and his wife Jeneen have only been living on their Donnybrook property for three years, they both come from farming families and getting in and giving it a go has been second nature.
Mr Tully hails from Victoria and his wife was from Boyup Brook.
Originally moving to Western Australia 15 years ago for a mining job, he first set up in Perth, but soon found he didn't enjoy city living.
"When my wife gave up her Perth job there was really no reason for us to stay anymore, so we started looking around," he said.
"We settled on Donnybrook because it was a good little balance, close enough to Bunbury if she wanted to work again and far enough out of the city that it wasn't in the city."
When they bought their property they were looking for somewhere to suit their long-term goal of opening a distillery.
Moving into the beverage industry was something Mr Tully always wanted to do after spending six years growing wine grapes back in Victoria.
"I kinda got a taste of being in the beverage industry and loved it," he said.
"The couple of places we looked at were firmly with the idea of starting a distillery, there were two properties down here with giant sheds and we bought one of them," he said.
Running a processing plant and with his background in farming, he has been able to piece together everything he's needed to get this first crop established.
Still working in the mines, he focuses on the distillery when he's back home, along with help from family, making it a true labour of love.
"My family are ex-farmers and my wife's family are ex-farmers, so my dad and father-in-law have been over quite regularly helping pull things apart, along with Jeneen's uncle, he grew up in farm out in Ardath, so he's been over helping out too, it's been a great time," he said.
"When we harvested back in November, we fiddled around for a couple of days and then the whole family came down, got involved and we had a great time."
Long term, Mr Tully hopes his product will be stocked in the local pub and online, but he also hopes to have a shop front in Donnybrook.
For now his first barley harvest has been an enjoyable one, something that was important for this farmer who has a love of old machinery.
"The next cheapest one I found had a 25 foot front on it, so it would have only taken about 10 minutes to harvest everything which wouldn't have been much fun," he said.
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