George Gibson, Many Waters farm, Arthur River, has a lot to be pleased about with this year's canola crop.
Mr Gibson described the 45Y28 variety of canola as reliable, with 1900 hectares expected to produce some good results.
A neighbour growing the same variety appears to be in a similar situation."I think I hit the nail on the head with the canola this year," Mr Gibson said.
Overall this season his program covered 3600ha, with the balance made up of 1400ha of wheat and 300ha to barley.
Unfortunately he said the results were not as good with the barley and wheat offering, "but considering the year, I'm happy with how it's turned out".
Mr Gibson planted RockStar wheat and Planet barley, as well as a little bit of Zena barley to test it out.
RockStar wheat has performed well for a couple of years, and two seasons ago, it produced one of Mr Gibson's highest yields.
"The Planet barley has been a favourite for a while, it just punches the really good yields on wet years," he said.
"But it's sort of been letting us down over the past two years or so.
"(Next year) we're going to roll into the Zena, we're going to use it as a tool because it's IMI (Imidazolinone) tolerant.
"If we have to, we'll clean up paddocks with it.
"Hopefully it yields better, the Zena has a good reputation so far but everyone's saying the next one to use is Neo (a new variety developed by InterGrain)."
Since the start of the year, the paddocks received 268.5 millimetres of rainfall - a much drier season than last year.
Last year's rainfall for the growing season was well over 300mm.
Cold days for most of this year's growing season stunted the wheat's growth.
"The wheat sort of stood still after it germinated, and didn't grow," Mr Gibson said.
"It was dry going in, and it didn't have the plant density as it did last year.
"The wheat's not too bad now it's just the plants per square metre is lacking."
This year Mr Gibson started his seeding program on April 10.
"We didn't have quite an early start (to seeding) as we did last year, some blokes went early and some went late," he said.
"For the early blokes, it did pay off - we held off, throughout the year it probably showed that we could have gone earlier."
Mr Gibson expects to be harvesting from this week onwards and should be finished by the end of December.
With tinges of green still visible across the paddock, the wheat will be the last crop he harvests.
"It will be ready before that but we won't harvest it until later," he said.
"The last couple of years we finished up in the first week of January, but this year we're going a week or two earlier so we should be able to finish in the last week of December."
Perri Polson
Perri is an agriculture journalist with Farm Weekly. Originally from Ballarat, Victoria, Perri developed a love of regional and rural news at a young age, and now is passionate about advocating for the agricultural industry. Her interests include science, agronomy, livestock and food production.
Perri is an agriculture journalist with Farm Weekly. Originally from Ballarat, Victoria, Perri developed a love of regional and rural news at a young age, and now is passionate about advocating for the agricultural industry. Her interests include science, agronomy, livestock and food production.
