Gregor Knight farms with his father Malcom at ‘Golden Wattle’ in the Quambatook district. His sister Jane helps out on the farm at various stages during the year as well.
How’s harvest going?
Pretty good. We are happy with the yields so far (as at December 19) and we haven’t had too many machinery breakdowns.
It’s pretty slow going though. We’re only averaging 100 hectares per day on the wheat but the yields are good so we don’t mind.
Bulk handling of grain was quite slow for a start because everyone was delivering barely but it has spread out now because farmers have moved on to their wheat as well.
Will you be storing grain on your farm this harvest?
We’ll store as much grain as we can on farm because the grain receival site at Quambatook will fill up pretty quickly. We already have a bit of barley stored but will save most of the storage for the wheat.
Do you run sheep and have you thought about them at all during harvest?
We’ve got about 1800 breeding ewes at the moment and they’re currently grazing barley stubbles. We sowed a few barley crops for grazing this year and it worked really well. We took the sheep off the crops just before the September rains and they still produced good yields.
Are you making plans for next year?
Yes. As I’ve gone into each paddock to harvest it, I’ve thought about what crop would work in the paddock next year based on current yields. The stubble loads are big this year so we’ve tried to cut the crops low to reduce the straw we’ll have to sow through in autumn.
There should be good subsoil moisture so we’re looking at growing some more canola. It’ll also help us combat some weed issues we’ve found including annual ryegrass.
Hear Gregor discuss the harvest, his plans for 2017 and his involvement in the GAPP initiative on BCG in Focus (linked below).
