Cropping Western Australia: Where there’s a Will there’s a way
IT’S been a tough road, but Will Carmody has loved the ride, writes EMMA FIELD.
WILL Carmody doesn’t look like a modern day farming pioneer. But he is.
The 55-year-old West Australian’s extraordinary farming career includes developing his farm from uncleared bush blocks into a highly profitable and technologically savvy business.
But it hasn’t been just technology that has lifted his yields by about one tonne a hectare in the past five years, it has also been “tinkering at the edges” with management techniques and timing.
At the age of 13, Will was doing school by correspondence during the day and after school was clearing virgin scrubland on a bulldozer on the new farm run by his parents and three brothers near Esperance in Western Australia, one of the last areas in Australia to be opened up for broadacre farmland development.
This year he planted 4650ha of crops on that farm, Maryland Too, which he now manages with his wife, Margaret, and two permanent staff about 120km west of Esperance at Cascade. This year’s sowing was 40 years after his family planted their very first crop in the autumn of 1977.
In 1976 the family moved from the Great Southern region of Western Australia to Cascade, about 800km southeast of Perth in high-rainfall sandy soil country.
When they arrived at their new allotment, there was the barest of bush tracks, no freshwater and the closest town for supplies, Esperance, was about two to three hours away.
“It was absolutely extraordinary and pretty amazing times,” Will said. “There wasn’t even a track, there was no house … there was no power, or telephone, the nearest telephone was about 60km away.
“The first night Mum and Dad were in the caravan and we got to the spot in the bush and got our swags out and camped under the semi-trailer with a fire.
“That was it, welcome to Maryland Too, welcome to Cascade.”
MIX AND MATCH
THE farm was eventually developed into a mixed operation, however until they established fences and dams, the family started with cropping. The adjustment to a high-rainfall environment was difficult.
They soon realised the most reliable month for rainfall at Cascade was November, which averaged about 40-50mm, out of their annual 380mm rainfall.
But November also coincided with the start of harvest.
“The first few crops we planted were shocking … coming from the wheatbelt where harvest was dry and easy, down at Esperance suddenly moisture meters became important and we had to get used to the rain and the drizzle,” Will said.
The clearing process took about four years, and despite Landcare being more than a decade from inception, they took care to leave some native vegetation across the farm.
But this didn’t please their bank manager at the time, who questioned their conservation practices. “We left bush on creek ways (and) some other larger areas, which were not cleared,” he said. “It was a comment we got from one of our bank managers. He said ‘why have you left some bush uncleared’? We had to explain it’s better for wind erosion and other things to leave it there.”
The Carmody family has planted about 50,000 trees on the farm and plan to plant another 20,000-30,000 in coming years.
MAD MAX
THE 1980s proved extremely challenging on the new farm, with a series of droughts and the winds in the south costal region causing erosion to the light and sandy soils, which were under maximum tillage.
However the adoption of no-till proved to be the key to the region’s success.
“The 1980s was a very hard decade, we had droughts and flood. The making of Esperance and Cascade was the no-till revolution, this was what really turned us around,” Will said.
The droughts in the 1980s were also tough on the livestock.
To manage the sheep they bought a block closer to the coast with high rainfall. This new farm saw the family diversify into mining, because an industrial mineral called vermiculite, which is used for potting mixes and fire doors, was found next to their block. They put infrastructure on their farm for the mining company.
“So we got involved in mining in a small way — it was a boutique mine and it was something different … it was another income stream and it limped us through (the drought),” Will said.
Sheep were the dominant industry in Esperance in the 1980s, the flock peaking at five million head before the wool price crash at the end of the decade. The Carmody family at one stage ran up to 30,000 sheep.
FLOCK SHOCK
WHEN the family partnership split in 2001, Will kept his sheep enterprise. However in about 2005 the mining boom in Western Australia resulted in a major shortage of shearers and farm staff.
Then analysis from his farm consultant showed despite the sheep taking up a quarter of the farm area every year, gross sheep income only made up 7 per cent in a good year, and 4 per cent in a dry year.
So Will got rid of the sheep, and cropping became the sole farm enterprise.
Some early adoption of technology pushed the cropping business along.
In 2003 Will was on the WA Precision Agriculture Steering Committee, established to look at new cropping technologies.
An article in the American Farm Journal convinced him to look at paddock variability, so besides moving to no-till sowing techniques, he also started using variable rate technology for granular fertiliser in 2003.
“We used biomass (data) from the satellite imagery and then we had a company that created the variable rate maps for us,” Will said.
“The very first year convinced me … we got a more consistent (quality) across the paddock, we were able to lift our protein up. And that’s where you make the profit.”
LIQUID GOLD
JUST over a decade ago they started using liquid fertiliser along with granular fertiliser. Liquid fertiliser is a more expensive option, but granular application is often limited by weather conditions.
“You can spray liquids in any condition, sun, wind, rain whatever is happening at the time … you can cover more hectares and you can do it day and night,” he said.
“The timeliness is the key to it, and if you have a diversity of applications. We chose the best one at the time and when the plant growth stage needs it.”
Timing and management has become the key to improving the business in the last five years, with summer weed spraying another example of this. “Originally we started spraying in February, then we moved to January, now we will be spraying in December. We get a lot of rain at that time,” he said.
Will also modified machinery to condense the crop material into a narrow row behind the header to help with reducing the weed burden. This row is burnt in some years, but being in a thin line also prevents weed spread.
Sowing has also shifted forward about three weeks over the past decade and they now start in early April and keep their rotation to a simple three years of wheat, barley canola.
“It’s about chasing the moisture, and getting the plant growth up before it gets too wet and plant growth slows down,” Will said.
VARIETY BASH
OTHER “little management things” that have made a difference include better canola varieties, which have increased average yields from about 900kg/ha up to 1.8 tonnes/ha last year.
Will also does 110 annual soil samples, which includes deep soil tests and analysis for trace elements, plus a recent management change was to make sure they were interpreting the data to make good nutrition decisions.
The farm has six to eight nitrogen-rich strips across the farm to test nitrogen application levels, and they use infra-red cameras or Trimble’s GreenSeeker sensing system to capture and analyse the health of the plants.
All the “tinkering around the edges with our management” has made a big difference, Will said.
In the past four years the farm has averaged about three tonnes/ha for wheat — five years ago this average was about two tonnes/ha.
The family was also early adopters of new data capturing technology provided by AgWorld.
Nine years ago they started using the online AgWorld program, which later evolved into a smartphone and tablet app to record information about production, inputs and key production data on each paddock and also to share this with their agronomist and consultants.
Forward price contracts are locked for a percentage of the expected production, and the AgWorld program and all the data collected is useful to predict yield outcomes, which makes marketing the crop easier.
“When you have good information you can build that level of confidence, and build the marketing strategy,” Will said.
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