Bruces stick to traditional mixed farming operation at Barooga in NSW Riverina

JOHN and Sarah Bruce love cropping.

Top crops: John and Sarah Bruce at Barooga, are glad they have stuck to their cropping/li

JOHN and Sarah Bruce love cropping.

But in the heart of what is now almost totally farming country at Bar­ooga, in the NSW Riverina, they still run livestock.

The Bruces are among the few who have stuck to the traditional mixed farming operation, and the numbers stack up.

Their 1200ha farm is 25 per cent stock and 75 per cent cropping. And, while they grow summer and winter crops, they find they still have enough time to run a sheep enterprise.

Part of this is to do with history. John’s father, John, always had stock on the farm and John had been comfortable with running this side of the operation. But they maintain it is also to do with income, and with Sarah in control of the books she’s more than happy to tell it how it is. And how it is means livestock offers an additional income, a return on stubble crops and utilisation of labour.

John and Sarah run their farms with the assistance of a farm apprentice and, with the heavy program of summer and winter cropping, livestock and doing some contracting when time and opportunity presents, there’s precious few spare days on the calendar.

But such is the drive and determination of this young couple that they see this as par for the course as they establish their farming enterprises.

John’s father was ready to step aside from farming and gave his son the chance to invest in the farm or the family would sell when he fell ill.

At just 23 John was handed the total financial and management control of the farm — an opportunity he hasn’t taken lightly. With Sarah they’ve well positioned the viable farm, which they say will always include livestock and cropping.

The Bruces’ farm about 800ha of winter crops a year, mostly wheat and canola but will include more barley this year. Dryland winter cropping is their biggest enterprise, and factoring in more barley is a calculated strategy.

“If the season is looking tough, barley will hang in there and you are guaranteed something,” John said. “It’s part of our risk-management strategy.”

Mostly the rotations are two crops of wheat, a canola crop and then back to wheat. And more and more, grazing wheats, especially Wedgetail, are factored in to their wheat varieties.

Part of this is to allow them to carry more stock — they aim to join about 1300 Merino ewes each year and there is often a feed gap in early winter.

“We have a lot of lucerne-based pastures which really don’t offer much until spring,” John said. “The grazing wheats offer us feed when we need it.”

Running one to two lambs a hectare for a couple of months generates up to $150/ha from the grazing value alone.

Add to this the yields of up to 2.5 tonnes/ha from the grazed wheat, and the numbers stack up, John says.

The feed wheats receive a bit of extra nitrogen to boost performance, and stock are pulled off at the start of August. “Last year, we would not have fed grain to our ewes for more than 10 weeks so it shows that these feed wheats are very valuable in our system,” he said.

The Merino flock is joined chiefly to Border Leicester rams and sometimes to White Suffolks when a replacement mob is bought in later in the year, as it was last season. The first-cross wether lambs are sold to the trade, while the ewe lambs are marketed at Corowa stores sales.

The Bruces shear three times every two years, and say this has helped them add $20 a sheep to the wool income.

The couple use the PAM mapping system and John said this had helped give a “big picture” view to their operation.

“I take an iPad out into the field and enter any details straight away,” John said.

The Bruces are fans of dry sowing and begin sowing their winter grazing wheats as soon as it rains in March.

“It needs six weeks to be up and cracking to offer much feed,” John said. “And we’ve never had a complete failure.”

Their main winter cereal is Livingstone, and this will be dry sown after the canola goes in mid-April, again dry sown if it has not rained.

“It fits well with our summer cropping program,” John said. “We pull up between sowing canola and wheat and go and harvest the rice. The wheat will then be in by the first week of May at the latest.”

Their summer cropping is a mix of rice and maize, and growing maize for the first time has been a positive. They like the flexibility with maize, which can stand in the paddock without damage from the weather.

“We are hoping to yield 10 tonnes/ha for rice and the same for maize,” John said.

What the Bruces are clear about, above else, is that the figures stand up. They have opted for high quality secondhand machinery instead of new, they use machinery when they can for contracting to offset payments, they grow crops because they make money and they run sheep for profit.

“Things do go wrong and we don’t always make the right decision,” John said. “But we treat these like challenges and try to make the best decisions we can with the information we have.”