Collaborative farming: Bulla Burra’s unique approach

FRIENDS band together to achieve economy of scale in cropping, and find success, writes JAMES WAGSTAFF.

Harvest bounty: Farmers Robin Schaefer (left) and John Gladigau in a freshly harvested barley crop near Alawoona in the South Australian Mallee. Picture: James Wagstaff

IT has been eight years since John Gladigau and Robin Schaefer threw out the rule book on farming. But do not expect the South Australian ­Mallee croppers to go back and retrieve it anytime soon.

In fact, they could easily write a new one, such has been the success of their collaborative approach to farming that has led to a dramatic increase in scale and efficiencies.

John, from Alawoona, and Robin, from Loxton, had their share of sceptics when, in 2009, they joined forces to create a single farming business.

John had held an interest in collaborative farming for about a decade ­before researching the topic as part of his Nuffield farming scholarship in 2007, but said putting the theory into practice was fraught with danger.

“Not only were Robin and I friends but our wives were best friends,” John says, joking.

“We broke rule one, two, three and four right there from the start.”

Under the plan the business, Bulla Burra, leased the Gladigau and Schaefer farms — both 2000ha. Older tractors, seeders and headers were sold and replaced with state-of-the-art machines, an extra 4000ha of land was leased or sharefarmed, and a board with an independent chairman was appointed.

“That has been one of the big keys to what we believe is our success ... to have a robust, decision-making environment,” John said.

“It is absolutely 100 per cent necessary when you bring people ­together, to take out the emotions and ensure you are operating in the right type of business environment because sometimes you’re thinking with your heart, not with your head.”

WELL SUITED

JOHN said he and Robin placed themselves in the business “where we believed we could add the most value”. Robin, who received a Nuffield scholarship in 2012 to study farm management systems, became production manager, overseeing the daily operations, while John looked after things from a business perspective.

“There were lots of hurdles along the way but I think we’re fairly refined now and we’re really, really starting to see the benefits,” John said.

Bulla Burra now grows 11,000ha of crops, employs six full-time staff, uses state-of-the-art farming practices and has pioneered the growing of legumes in the marginal northern Mallee.

Bulla Burra is divided into two “cells”: 5500ha at Alawoona (including 2000ha that has been in John’s family since 1956) and a similar amount near Loxton (including Robin’s 2000ha farm that has been held by his family for more than a century).

John said the maximum ­between one farm and another was 10km with soil types (“it’s sandier and rockier at Alawoona”) and rainfall varying slightly.

Alawoona receives an average 275mm to Loxton’s 250mm (about 175mm of which falls during the growing season).

This year the farms have ­received almost 350mm and John said their 4000ha of wheat, 3300ha of barley, 1000ha of chickpeas, 700ha of field peas, 400ha of canola, 400ha of lupins and 300ha of lentils were achieving outstanding yields as harvest ramps up.

CROP TOPS

BULLA Burra works on a system of creating a crop rotation that “takes grasses and diseases out of the equation”.

Currently it is a year of wheat followed by barley followed by a legume.

“As we get more and more confident in it, our ultimate ­rotation is cereal-legume-­cereal,” John said.

“We are not quite there yet to go 50:50 but we would like to think that is what it will become.”

While wheat is their biggest crop, John and Robin have been growing more barley in recent years “because it works better in the rotations”.

“Even though the prices aren’t spectacular, this is really good barley country,” John said.

“Our gross margin on barley in the past few years is ­actually pretty good, mainly because we’ve actually got quite a bit of malt out of it,” he said.

The pair adhere to “prescription farming”, aiming to start sowing crops in the ­second week of April as opposed to waiting for the season to break.

“This year was the classic in that we had a dry start and we started sowing in the second week of April.

“It didn’t rain, but we kept sowing, and it didn’t rain,” John said. “But we were confident in our system — that was the thing.”

Crops are direct drilled by two John Deere Conserva Pak air seeders on 30cm inter-row spacings, all at variable rates.

Mono-ammonium phosphate fertiliser and a sulphate of ammonia and urea blend are also applied at seeding.

RATES NOTICE

JOHN said some of the biggest ­advances for the business had come through variable rate seeding and fertiliser ­applications.

“It has evened up our farm extraordinarily well,” he said.

“We’re growing crops where we never thought we’d grow them before.”

John said they target 100 plants per square metre.

Barley crops are sown at an average of 50kg of seed/ha and wheat at 45kg/ha.

To get the best “bang for our buck”, seeding and fertiliser application is targeted on the farms’ mid slopes.

For example, with wheat, flat country is sown at an average 35kg of seed/ha, 45kg/ha on the midslopes and 55kg/ha on the hill tops.

About 80 per cent of urea is applied at seeding.

The remainder is spread as needed during the growing season.

John said the introduction of legume crops into the farming rotation in recent years had been extremely beneficial as well as a massive learning curve given the “different agro­nomic risks and ways you need to go about it”.

“As you get confident you expand a bit more and we’ve got to the stage now where about a third of our cropping program is legumes,” he said.

As well as providing nutrient benefits to the soil for the following year’s cereal crop — “our crops that are on legume pasture this year are just extraordinary” — legumes have produced the best gross margins for the past three years.

PAY DIRT

HARVEST usually kicks off in late October, depending on the season.

This year, following 50mm of rain in September, it is running “a good three weeks behind”.

Bulla Burra runs two 40-foot John Deere S670 harvesters with two chaser bins.

“The harvesters once they are going just don’t stop, with the chasers dragging all the grain,” John said.

“We still get an enormous amount away in a day and if we were running another harvester the logistics that sit ­behind that with storage and handling would be ­phenomenal.”

The business relies on contractors to cart the crop, with up to seven trucks expected to be used this harvest.

Yields normally range from about 1.6 tonnes/ha for barley, 1.4 tonnes/ha benchmark for wheat (against a district average of 1.2 tonnes/ha), 0.6 tonnes/ha for canola (which is direct headed, not windrowed), 0.6 tonnes/ha for chickpeas, 0.6-0.7 tonnes/ha for peas and 0.4 tonnes/ha for lentils.

John said expected legume yields were hard to determine because “we just don’t know what normal is”.

“The years we have been growing them have been poor springs,” John said.

“And this year will be way in excess of what normal would be.”

TORCH LIGHT

JOHN said windrow burning — torching the windrow of chaff left behind the harvester to remove weed seed — was “really effective” and “almost buys you another year in the rotation”.

The practice is restricted to legumes and wheat.

“With barley it is too risky — you light it up and you take the whole paddock out,” John said.

“It is a science, you’ve got to have the temperature right. It has to burn for long enough to sterilise the seed.”

Crops are harvested close to the ground.

In a normal year Bulla Burra aims to finish harvest around Christmas “and if you finish two weeks before it says the season’s not real good”.

“The reality is this yar it’s going to be mid-to-late January,” John said.

“Partly because we started a couple of weeks later (due to the wetter season) but also ­because the crops are so big, it’s going to be slow going.”

John said the business was pretty active in keeping on top of the market, but used Rural Directions grain marketing at Clare to help sell its crop.

“We have a marketing plan of how much we will forward sell and how much we will sell during harvest, and whatever is left post harvest we treat as our own pool which we market over the following few months — these are our triggers — and that has worked really well,” he said.

Bulla Burra has no on-farm storage but it is in future plans, particularly for legumes.

FORWARD THINKERS

LOOKING forward, John said the future of the business lay with “the 1, 2, 3 per centers, and how we can build on those”.

“We are not looking at getting bigger, if anything we’re looking at getting smaller by picking the best dirt and maximising it in some ways,” he said.

“It’s about getting the rotations right, it’s getting some of the business principles better, marketing better, potentially some value adding.

“That’s where we see our shorter to longer term future.”

John said the most significant achievement of the business was a clear reduction in its cost of production, rather than purely focusing on return on investment.

He described collaboration as “the catalyst, not the cure”.

“By going down the collaboration path, all the structures and systems we had to put in place, made us a professional organisation,” John said.

“Within a normal family business that is a hard thing to do.”

Meanwhile, John and Robin are happy to enjoy the spoils of this year’s improved seasonal conditions.

“We have put a lot of different things in place in the past eight years, always with the promise that there will be a time when we see the fruits of this,” John said.

“This year has just been ­extraordinary. This is what we have been working towards.”