ACROSS four days and 1520 kilometres, the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) Western Regional Panel was all ears as it embarked on its annual spring tour last week.
From September 12-15, a group of GRDC board members, staff and panel members toured the Kwinana West and Albany port zones, meeting with local growers, grower group representatives, researchers and advisers.
The tour began at Dale and moved through Bulyee, Wickepin, Corrigin, Highbury, Narrogin, Williams and Quaelup, before finishing at the wheat and barley hyper-yielding field day with FAR Australia at Frankland River last Thursday.
The annual tour ensures GRDC develops a deep understanding of the issues facing local growers and identifies any gaps for potential investment.
This year, there were four key focus areas from growers - diversity in rotations, investment in oats, rotational grazing and gross margins given the cost of inputs.
GRDC Western Regional Panel chairman and Mingenew grower Darrin Lee said there was a lot of chat about the need for a legume in the rotation.
"One of the clear points from growers was that anything they grow after a legume, certainly with the cost of nitrogen, is giving them the best results," Mr Lee said.
"We saw demonstrations of faba beans, chickpeas and vetch, but we need to work out how to put a legume into a site specific area which works really well for them."
It was positive news for GRDC which has a large scale legume demonstration project heading into next season.
However, growers emphasised that while finding a legume to grow would be fantastic, more work was also needed in terms of the logistics of marketing and handling, particularly when it comes to onfarm storage.
Another constant message from growers was oats, with a particular focus on their fit into the program in the Narrogin and Highbury area.
From those growers, oats presented a great business opportunity in terms of value adding space, but also served a purpose as a risk mitigation strategy.
The tour visited Highbury grower Stuart Moyse's to discuss oat production, with the need for better breeding and new varieties a key area of concern.
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Oats are his bread and butter with a grain making up at least one third of his cropping program every year.
"I feel like oats are the poor cousin in the grain industry when it comes to research and development," Mr Moyes said.
"There are only two oat varieties which are out there for milling, as we don't do hay, and one of them has been out since 2009, whereas there are new varieties of canola, wheat and barley which come out every season."
With that in mind, he believes a lot more work needs to be done in the breeding space to take new oat varieties, particularly for milling, to the market.
"Obviously everyone wants to aim for higher yields, but we also need more tolerances towards chemicals and disease, so we need more research done to give us a better milling oat with those features," Mr Moyse said.
"A lot of oat farmers are doing their own trials and most of us are using chemicals which are not actually registered for oats, but we've been using them for years because we've tried it and it works.
"Even something as simple as Treflan, which has been around for a long time, has only recently been registered for oats and even then we're told to use one litre, yet we've been using 2L for five to seven years."
Rotational grazing was also a hot topic for farmers on the tour, with plenty of chat about the opportunity to value-add to their stock business, as well as using it as a frost mitigation method to adjust the phenology of plant timing in terms of flowering.
There was also a lot of discussion across the four days about the cost of inputs and the use of alternative nitrogen sources.
Mr Lee said farmers were very aware of the input cost impact, so gross margins are at the forefront of their thinking.
"We need to ask how we drive the system as hard as we can while also making the best dollar return," Mr Lee said.
"It's lovely to grow a five tonne per hectare crop, but if it's costing 4t/ha to do it, the gross margin just isn't there."
The constructive two-way conversations had with growers over the course of the tour will be used by GRDC for the development of its 2023-28 research, development and extension plan.
