Pete Williamson lives in Kerang with his wife Christina and son Lewis. Along with his parents Gerald and Pam, he runs a 100% cropping enterprise, Willstone Farm, in the Quambatook and Kerang districts.
Like many farmers in his district, plenty of moisture around sowing created challenges at the start of the season but now, despite having to manage mouse populations, Pete is cautiously optimistic about how the season may pan out.
How are your crops looking and did you have problems at sowing with seed bursting or stubble issues?
Our season is going well despite having to overcome a lot of hurdles getting the crop in. Last year we harvested high to get the crop off quickly because it was shedding a lot of grain. So this year we chose to change our normal practice and sow one of our paddocks at a 15 degree angle rather than our normal 0 line, and for one of our lodged Scope barley stubble paddocks, we had to burn it in order to direct drill. The rest of the crops have a few poor germination sections where the seeder pulled up big clumps of straw.
The mice have been a major problem with all cereal stubble paddocks giving us issues, the head loss we suffered last year really built up the mice numbers. So far we have baited our lentil and canola four times and our barley twice. I think we could have baited a lot harder but getting mice bait on time was the issue. We lost an 80ha paddock of canola even though it was baited. We quickly made the decision to spray it out and re-sowed it into wheat. Luckily the wheat looks good! I still think mice are not fully under control and we are currently putting out some test baits to monitor the activity.
We have some irrigation land that we pre-irrigated in early March with the view to sow faba beans and canola. Unfortunately due to high stubble load and rainfall, the paddocks never dried out and we couldn’t even burn them due to the low temperatures. Thus, they never got sown and we have 160ha of chemical fallow.
On the pea stubbles, I managed to sow wheat but had lots of issues with burst seed, I sprayed out 10ha and re-sowed into late barley on the 24 July to fill the gap, it will be interesting to see how it goes.
Even on some of the dry land I had some barley burst due to high rainfall and had to re-sow sections. Not that I want to admit it, but I got the air seeder bogged on my last run, it wasn’t a pretty sight!
How much rain have you received all year and for the growing season? Has this altered your crop nutrition plans?
Our farm has received approximately 250mm for the year and 144mm in the growing season. Currently the Normanville moisture probe is showing a full profile! We soil tested all our paddocks for nitrogen and with the help of Yield Prophet® Lite we have been trying to set them up to achieve at least 3-4t/ha for cereal. It will be interesting to see how they yield and if I should have gone a bit harder.
All our cereal received 100kg/ha of urea and I have just finished spreading for the second time on some of our later crops taking some paddocks up to 200kg/ha of urea. I know we are underdone on our canola and some of our wheat but it got away on us, though overall I think we have a nice spread to see some good crops.
Have your crops suffered any frost damage yet? How do you manage frost?
As far as I know we don’t have any frost damage yet…touch wood. Hopefully we can get through the season without too much damage. Our normal frost management plan is often based around different sowing times of the crops and we are lucky that our farm is spread out with variation in ground elevation, hopefully if a frost event damages our crops then some won’t suffer as much as others.
What are your expectations for the rest of the season?
Our crops do look really good (where there is no mice damage) and I hope we can see through the season without any further problems. I am cautiously optimistic that it will finish well though we have to see if there will be any surprises like heat shock or frost. We are currently monitoring for new mice activity and also stripe rust in wheat, but so far so good.
Many weeds at the moment?
I have just finished our main spray program and am currently patching our little problem places of ryegrass or wild oats. Overall the crops look pretty clean but last year we got caught with some volunteer vetch in our wheat and it couldn’t be sold in the system, thus we will make sure that doesn’t happen again!
