Boll game a home run for Kahl family

ACHIEVING the maximum output from what’s available, while being sustainable, is the Kahl family’s farming mantra.

Good team: Nuffield scholar Daniel Kahl and his Irish wolfhound, Fergus, in his cotton crop at Wee Waa in northern NSW.

ACHIEVING the maximum output from what’s available, while being sustainable, is the Kahl family’s farming mantra.

Their business, Merced Farming, operates across seven properties totalling 7500ha around Wee Waa in the Namoi Valley of northwest NSW. Of this 3500ha is irrigated, 800ha used for dryland cropping and 2200ha for grazing.

The Kahl family first started farming their property, Glencoe, in the 1960s when Paul Kahl, along with his family, moved from California to farm with more freedom.

The first cotton crop of 26ha was planted in 1961 and harvested the following year. And they have been farming there ever since.

Paul passed on the management of the business to his sons, Robert and James, in 1976, and they have now been joined in the business by James’s sons Daniel, as business manager, and Sam, as cropping manager.

While cotton is the primary crop, with a record 1720ha planted last year, the Kahls also produce wheat, mung beans, corn, and they run 300 Angus breeding cows.

In a full production year, they
produce 20,000 bales of cotton, with yields of more than 12 bales a
hectare, well above the 3.7 bales/ha they produced from their first crop in 1961.

SPOILED FOR CHOICE

DANIEL said in any given year they grew cotton on half of the irrigation area, providing they had full water availability, with wheat, mung beans or corn grown on the remainder.

The calves of the Angus cattle are sold as weaners, at about 350kg, directly to the saleyards, where feedlots usually purchase them.

“Our primary operation is growing cotton, but we want a diverse rotation so we can spread risk, improve soil heath, change the chemicals we use to prevent resistance and given the season make the most of the water we have,” Daniel said.

He said they made decisions based on five key things: land, water, people, equipment and capital.

The mission at Merced Farming is to use these five key factors to get the best output.

“Our decision making is based firstly on what we have the least of,” Daniel said. “So this year, plus most other years, that is water and we want to work out what the best return per megalitre of water is rather than the best return per hectare.”

While Daniel said they also took into consideration returns based on the other key inputs, it was often about how they could be most efficient with water. They bank on about six to seven megalitres of water to grow 1ha of cotton.

“If water is available we look at how we use that the best within the hectares we have available as well as considering what we can grow with the available staff and equipment we have.”

MARGIN CALL

WHILE yield is still important, Daniel said they were a “bit different” in that they grew crops more for margin than yield. Again this comes down to using water more efficiently.

“We are looking to see how we much we can make the plant work to get a good outcome,” he said.

In years where there was limited water, Daniel said they looked at whether they could plant double the amount of crop and stretch the watering out.

“We don’t have a lot of consistent water availability, so we’ve found ways to adapt that are relatively simple,” Daniel said. “We are trying to get the most yield out of the inputs we have but doing so in a way that manages our risk.”

Daniel said their workforce was an important factor in being able to operate at full production.

Merced Farming employs between 20 and 23 permanent staff, including workshop and administration staff, with an assistant farm manager on each property, responsible for looking after things such as irrigation and farm hygiene.

Daniel, a 2017 Nuffield Scholarship recipient looking into where the next generation of farm managers will come from and how quality candidates can be attracted to a career in farming, said this was where his inspiration came from.

“We can find people to fill those labour jobs, but we find it hard to fill those middle management, skilled roles,” Daniel said. “As farming advances the need for just labour becomes less important. We are going to need skilled people who can use technology and make decisions as well.”

RIGHT TRACK

DANIEL said he didn’t find a “silver bullet” during his studies, but part of it was creating better pathways for those not from farms, advocating for careers in agriculture at the school level, and providing more structured and specific on-farm training.

“In the cotton industry particularly, there is a lot of research that could be delivered in the form of short courses for middle managers who might not otherwise choose further study,” he said.

Daniel said they were using Bollgard-3 cotton varieties and found what worked in their system after their second season using them.

Depending on the season and variety, the planting window for cotton is September through to early November. Bollgard-3 714 is an early finishing variety and for Daniel the shorter season works as it allows them to spread out harvest. They’ve also planted the Bollgard-3 748, a later variety that is high yielding in their conditions.

With so much emphasis on water use, Daniel said they used telemetric flow metres on their river pumps as well as soil moisture probes, which could all be checked from home on their smartphones.

“It is still important to farm by looking with your eyes and feeling with your hands, but tools like this can assist in understanding what you can see,” he said.

With an average annual rainfall of 500-550mm, irrigation water is from surface water from the Namoi River and an annual groundwater allocation.

LAKE PLACID

WATER is “allocated” from Lake Keepit on a continuous accounting basis, meaning only once water for evaporation, environment and town supply is taken into account is water allocated to irrigators.

In an ideal world, when there is a full water allocation for four years, the Kahls’ cropping rotation consists of cotton in the first year, wheat in the second, then mung beans planted in to wheat stubble in summer, fallow for winter and then back to cotton, followed by winter fallow and corn.

The first crop to drop out of the rotation is corn, as it takes as much water as cotton. Mung beans are the crop of choice because they use minimal water for a good margin and put nitrogen back in to the soil.

“If there’s no rain at all, mung beans use about one megalitre of water, which yields about 1.5-1.75 tonnes/ha and returns about $1000 a tonne,” Daniel said.

Daniel said they liked growing corn and cotton in succession because corn added organic matter back in to the soil and their roots accessed nutrients cotton normally didn’t.

Each crop means the Kahls can use different herbicides to manage weeds and pests.

Sustainability is also a key factor in the way the Kahls farm, which means looking for better ways to improve soil health through minimising compaction and using prescribed tillage to incorporate organic matter into the soil, water efficiency and ensuring their practises are offset environmentally by maintaining and improving pasture and riparian zones.

BEST PRACTICE
TO ensure they keep up the effort, they aim to maintain a minimum Level 2 accreditation through Cotton Australia’s Best Management Practice program.

“The myBMP program provides growers with a great platform to assess what they’re doing well and where they can improve,” Daniel said.

“It’s also an important part of the cotton industry maintaining its social licence.”

Daniel said they also continued to use a traditional cotton picker with a basket, rather than a round-bale picker.

“We are concerned about the compaction issues with the round balers and the dual-wheeled machine doesn’t really fit with our crop rotation in a 2m bed system,” he said.

As a result, this year they bought in a CrustBuster Modulating Boll Buggy from the US — the first in Australia. The machine is a module press and boll buggy in one, eliminating the need for multiple module presses and a boll buggy.

“It means we can look after the soil and the seed bed for the next crop by using the lighter basket pickers and keeping the heavier machinery out of the field while still reducing the labour and equipment requirements at picking,” he said.

Daniel said they hoped to make some modifications to it for next harvest but it provided a promising option as an alternative to the round baler.

Daniel said current cotton prices were strong off the back of poor weather affecting crops in the US, China and India.

“Mills are chasing goodquality cotton, so at the moment a whole bunch of things are pushing up Australian prices,” he said.

On a broader scale, Daniel said natural fibres were starting to make a comeback.