Farm in Focus: Tom Moll, Winiam East

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Tom Moll farms with his father Geoff, mother Cathy, grandfather Alyn, wife Maree and daughter Sophie at Winiam East, near Nhill in the Wimmera. Tom has been farming for about 12 years. Grandfather Alyn, 80, has retired to town but still helps Tom and his father Geoff out, mostly shifting machinery etc. as required.

Enterprise mix: We’re all cropping these days, grain and hay. We ran breeding ewes up until about three or four years ago but have just bought in sheep after harvest since then. We got out of sheep because of the workload. Plus, neither dad nor I were really interested in them, so it worked for us. We substitute a bit of vetch hay now instead of running stock.

We farm about 2600ha. Our main crops are wheat and barley. We’ve also got some faba beans in, vetch for hay and brown manure. We still do some traditional long fallow as well.

How do you manage operations/workload at this time of year?

Dad is on the boomspray running over our fallow doing a double knock of ryegrass. Herbicide resistance, glyphosate in particular, is one of our emerging issues and it’s definitely influencing our rotation and changing the way we do things.

We’re also busy preparing machinery for harvest and hay. We’ve spent a lot more money on preventative maintenance on the header this year, but we’re not doing too much else differently as a consequence of this season. We rely on a contractor for our freight. We’ve got more on-farm storage than we’ve ever had, but in a year such as this one, it’s still going to be inadequate.

What have you learnt from this season?

I’ve never seen it this wet in spring before. It’s the wettest spring I’ve ever seen by a long shot. We’ve got a creek running through our property that feeds the Nhill swamp. I’ve only seen it run in winter once before – its run three times this year. We’ve had 520mm since the start of the year.

I’ve learnt to be proactive with fungicides this year. Access hasn’t been as much of an issue for us (compared to many other Wimmera farmers) because we don’t grow a lot of legumes for harvest and cereal fungicides have been easy to get a hold of. It’s more that we’ve had to do a lot of fungicide spraying in narrow windows which has probably been the hardest part of the operation. Generally, we’ve had enough time to do what we’ve needed to. We haven’t had a bogged tractor yet, but there’s been a few close calls.

What are you thinking about when it comes to planning for next season?

Rotations and handling stubbles, particularly cutting height, are firmly in the back of my mind. If there’s any amount of summer rainfall, there’ll be a lot of summer spraying because the soil profile is so full of water at the moment.

Trying to retain stubble will definitely be an issue this year because of heavy stubble loads. We always endeavour to retain as much stubble as we can but we’re not set up for inter-row sowing and there is a limit for how much we can handle. We may mulch stubbles with the header after harvest to break them down. We’ll have to do some degree of burning for sure.

We haven’t got any canola in this year, but usually when we grow it we burn the windrows. We tried to have a low risk cropping strategy this year and didn’t grow canola which in hindsight wasn’t the best thing in the world. Every time we decide to drop canola we seem to have a good spring!

We’ll probably grow a few more beans next year. Even though they’ve been hit hard with chocolate spot this year, they seem to perform very well. The only issue will be harvesting them as a lot are lodged. More seems to be on the ground than standing up.

What are the challenges for young farmers?

I’m fortunate that three or four people from my year at school are farming around Nhill so I have a great network. I think Nhill has a lot to offer and I don’t see regional decline causing any problems. I suppose, in my case, adapting to computer technology is a challenge. Anything mechanical is fine but computers can confuse me at times, particularly in the precision agriculture space.

Moving towards inter-row sowing and yield mapping are things I’ll need to get my head around more in the future. I think maintaining road infrastructure will be a huge issue, but that’s out of our hands a bit.

 

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