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Hello, Shauna, it's nice to be here with you.
Shauna Stone is our farmer today.
Shauna is a member of a very good farming family, and Shauna,
you're operating a farm in the Kojonup area of Western Australia.
Now, this is an area that has good rainfall.
And you have around about 1,000 hectares that you have,
each year, committed to the major crops of wheat,
and barley, and canola, is that right?
>> Correct, and oats, and we're cropping about 1,300 hectares now.
>> Right, right, so 1,300 hectares.
It's a family farm, it's mostly being run by you and your agronomist son.
The two of you are the only employees on the farm.
>> That's correct, Steve, so my son is an agronomist, which is extremely
valuable to our business, and he and I do make all the decisions.
My husband works off the farm, in the industry.
So yeah, so I've been running the farm with my son now for five years,
since he's been home working from his agronomy full-time work.
And we share the decision making,
although I'm very quickly trying to get him to make most of the decisions now.
And I'm just his guidance, really, and he's the machinery operator.
[LAUGH] >> Well, I know it's a good partnership,
and we're going to discuss, a little bit, your farming enterprise.
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>> So our farm is in a high-rainfall zone, so
we're expecting between 400 and 500 mils of rainfall a year.
And we've purchased a farm only three years ago, which was predominantly sheep
and stock up until we purchased it, and now we're trying to fully crop the farm.
So it's been an exciting cleanup and an exciting time for
us to convert a stock property into a cropping property.
>> Right, and you mentioned sheep and you mentioned rainfall.
How important is rainfall to your farming enterprise?
>> Extremely important, because we came from a medium rainfall zone,
which was tending to low rainfall, and we've gone to a high rainfall zone.
We actually really need the winter rainfall to
make crop production at its maximum.
>> Right, so in this sort of environment, the rainfall comes in April or
so, and that signifies the start of the growing season?
>> We prefer to plant all our crop during mid April to late May, and
if we can get rainfall prior to crop sowing, that's very, very important.
So anywhere from the beginning of April onwards is ideal.
We don't want too much rainfall in summer, but
we will take it because we can store it in the soil, ready for planting.
Potentially, 25 to 30 millimeters of rainfall will be enough to get us
planting, and then once we start, we don't stop.
We'll just keep going right through until the end of May,
until everything's planted.
>> Okay, so you mentioned the ability of the soil to store summer rainfall,
or some of it.
And I imagine, therefore, that minimum or
zero tillage is really important to your farming enterprise.
>> Very important, so with the minimum tillage,
we just cut through the soil with a knife blade, eventually,
which is probably 25 millimeters wide, and we make a narrow slot.
We put the seed and the fertilizer into that slot, and
then we'll seal it down again.
We're storing the moisture by sealing it down again, and we're also
creating a little catchment zone for future rainfall, which is really valuable.
>> Okay, so you would say the benefits of minimal tillage for
your farming are that you are saving precious soil moisture,
as well as minimizing any soil erosion issues.
>> Yes, yes, so we're maintaining the topsoil structure.
So the topsoil is preserved in the state it's in, year in, year out.
We're not disturbing a whole lot of the soil,
we're just disturbing a minor amount of it.
So yeah, it's able to store the moisture because it's got this nice humus layer,
a layer of organic matter on top, which we preserve.
It's very precious.
>> So the real advantages of minimum tillage,
in your farming career, you've seen those developments.
>> We certainly have, and it's the catcher of moisture as well,
into those furrows, which is really important, into that root zone.
Initially, we get that crop established.
Crop establishment's everything.
If we've got some moisture there, that's great, but
if we haven't, we know we can capture it and utilize it to its best.
>> So do you imagine that you'll be minimum tillage agriculture for
years and decades to come?
>> Minimum tillage, but I think there is an opportunity to turn the soil over,
maybe every now and then, to mix in products that we may want to mix in,
some clay or some lime.
And we're seeing that more in the dry rainfall zones now, but for us,
minimum tillage is ideal.
>> Right, so minimum tillage, and perhaps a disruptive practice of cultivation
to incorporate lime or something, once every ten years in a particular field.
>> Potentially, if you but it is really a last resort for us to have to do that.
>> Right, so it sounds like a good farming system.
What do you think the big challenges are to viability and
sustainability of your farming enterprise going forward?
>> For us, because we're total cropping our cropping areas,
the weed burden is quite massive.
So we need to drive the weeds' numbers down.
That's our biggest challenge at the moment, and
we need to do it with the use of chemicals.
But also, with the use of harvest weed seed management and summer grazing,
potentially, of and things like that.
So the challenge for us, yeah, is to just know that we can grow a weed-free crop,
because we have a beautiful soil type.
We can give it the right fertilizer, but
we need to not have that competition of weeds in that crop.
>> Right, so weeds, a major challenge.
Now, normally, farmers have been used to weeds,
but they've been able to easily control them with herbicides.
So why why do they remain an ongoing challenge if we have a wide
range of herbicides available to us?
>> Well, the herbicides won't last forever, of course, so
we need to preserve the herbicides we've got.
And we need to use them occasionally, and
not use the same herbicide every year and the same crop rotation every year.
So we need to rotate our crops around, which is also challenging,
to get different crops with different herbicide regimes so
that we can maintain the herbicides we've got.
Graeme MartinProfessor
