Growing barley for beer: A Yorke Peninsula farmer is the toast of the town with his premium beer label

If there’s anyone who knows how to make a buck out of farming it’s the Schillings from South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula.

THERE are not many farmers who can sit down at the end of a long, hot day and crack open a beer knowing it’s been produced from the very paddocks in which they’ve been working.

But, then again, Mark and Merridee Schilling aren’t your run-of-the-mill farmers.

The couple, who has built a successful cropping, seed cleaning and machinery import business over 2000ha at Cunliffe on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula during the past three decades, say a thirst for maximum market exposure prompted them to add a paddock-to-pint element — the Yorke Premium beer label — to the diverse mix late last year.

“As producers we’ve always just thought that we needed to grow the grain and sell it to someone else,” said Mark, who is a sixth-generation farmer and the fourth-generation of his family to grow crops on the Yorke Peninsula.

“But why can’t we be the same as the wine industry? They’ve got grapes on vines — we’ve got barley on stalks.

“I like to be able to promote my product and beer was one way I was able to do that quite simply without too much capital injection.”

Yorke Premium Malbro Mid Kolsch Ale is produced using malt barley grown on the Schilling farms, which is then malted at Coopers Malting and brewed by Pikes Brewing at Clare. It rolled off the lines for the first time in September last year and is sold at pubs and clubs throughout the Yorke Peninsula and Mid-North regions.

The Schillings have sold about 7000 litres, or more than 875 cases, of the beer this year, which Mark said was a good result given the label’s infancy. “The consumption market is challenging because there are so many brands and you’ve got to carve out a space,” Mark said.

“We are working on that provenance story. When I go somewhere new I like to taste the local beer — that’s the concept.”

SOLID FOUNDATION

MARK’S forebears emigrated to Australia from Prussia in the 1800s and settled in the Barossa Valley.

After a stint farming there and at Gilgandra in NSW, where they were subjected to flood and fire, Mark’s grandparents, Oscar and Augusta, moved to the Yorke Peninsula in 1925, where they cleared and opened up farming land.

Mark’s parents, Ashley and Barbara, took over the operation in 1964, establishing AG Schilling and Co. After leaving school, Mark returned to the farm in 1984 and took on more of a managerial role in 1992. He laments that he’s “the last of my Dad’s family farming” despite his grandfather setting up his father, two uncles and an aunt with farming land.

Mark and Merridee own 1012ha and sharefarm and lease a similar area within 25km of the home property. Part of the country is sharefarmed with the Hallo family from Adelaide, who trade as Malbro Pty Ltd, which the Schillings have used as the inspiration for the name of their first beer type the Malbro Mid.

Traditionally the region receives 350-400mm of rainfall annually but Mark said the key was what you could do with it.

Where his grandfather and father used to be able to achieve 2.5 tonnes/ha yields for their crops on that rainfall, now they can reap 4-4.5 tonnes/ha.

“It is pretty reliable because we are a light soil with low rainfall … we can have dry finishes and still get out of jail.” Mark said.

This year wheat and barley accounted for about 60 per cent of production with lentils making up 30 per cent and hay 10 per cent. Mark was one of the first farmers on the Yorke Peninsula to grow lentils.

SOIL SAVVY

PLANTING traditionally gets underway with wheat in late April early May and wraps up with legumes in June. In an effort to conserve precious soil moisture, all crops are planted by direct drill in standing stubble. “Disc drill is gold in this type of country because you only need half an inch (12.5mm) of rain and you can germinate a crop,” Mark said, adding that this year they had one of their best autumn breaks for a long time and finished seeding on the opening rain event. “That zero-till system works really well for us. We are back to seven-eight inch (17.8-20.3cm) row spacings now and I think that is going to prove its weight in gold when it comes to yields.”

The Schillings previously sowed on 10-inch, or 25cm, spacings but said this often led to increased weed competition.

With soils not subject to compaction like those in Victoria’s Wimmera, Mark said he didn’t need to be “a religious freak” in regards to controlled-traffic farming, but does work on 12.1m-spaced tram tracks. Depending on what crop and variety is sown, timing and weed pressure, seeding rates range between 70kg and 100kg/ha with the aim of growing 250-300 plants per square metre.

Fertiliser use is targeted with the Schillings using about 100kg/ha of MAP with zinc. Previously Mark and Merridee were big on liquid fertiliser at sowing but now spray it on foliar “because we can do that a bit more efficiently”. Between 200kg and 300kg/ha of urea is spread on wheat during the growing season, depending on conditions.

Conscious of soil health, they are big believers in putting metals and trace elements back in the soil. Previously they spread chicken manure on their paddocks prior to planting but have now switched to biosolids applied once every five years.

HOME STRETCH

THE Schillings work on an alternate rotation of cereals and legumes. Mark said he had been impressed with his lentil yields on wheat stubbles due to the amount of moisture retained. Lentils yielded about 1.5-1.7 tonnes/ha this year — “in one paddock we ended up over two tonnes/ha” — exceeding expectations of 1-1.2 tonnes/ha. Wheat yields varied from 3.5 tonnes to 4.5 tonnes/ha. Harvest usually starts about November 10-15 but this year they started on October 20 “and we were done in 20 days” due to the dry end to the season. “Bang, just like that, it just shut down and we were into it,” Mark said.

They ran two harvesters and three trucks, which they use instead of field bins. As the grain comes in from harvest, it is weighed, quality assurance tested and segregated according to its quality. The Schillings have capacity to store 35,000 tonnes of grain on farm, with four grain sheds in addition to almost 2500 tonnes of segregated vertical storage with 30 80-tonne silos.

Mark said he had already marketed about 20 per cent of this year’s crop. Some lentils will go in boxes to India — “the first shipment I’ve had to India in three years” — with the bulk of barley sold on the domestic market. A flour mill that supplies the Indian community in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane annually takes 30 per cent of the family’s wheat, with the remainder exported in boxes.

MAKES SENSE

MARK admits he has “many fingers in many pies” but sees value-adding as critical to the broader agriculture industry. He is a director of Grain Producers South Australia and chairs its value-add committee.

Mark said his move towards value adding was made in an effort to maximise gross margins. He budgets on a gross margin of about $1000-$1200/ha, with growing costs about $300/ha and more on leased country. “It is hard to buy land here — $9000 an acre ($22,240/ha) just down the road and up to $250 an acre ($618/ha) to lease country — it doesn’t make sense,” Mark said. “It is not what I am paying but it is what is being paid. So when you question why I do other things … it’s because when I look at those other numbers I’m not sustainable.”

In 2013, Mark teamed up with renowned chef Simon Bryant to sell packaged lentils, peas, chickpeas, broadbeans, wakame, raw honey and peanut oil to restaurants. His Agculture enterprise, which is involved in the importation of Atom Jet seeding openers and other machines from Canada, has origins back to 2007. Additionally, for the past five years Mark has been involved in the GIA pulse-breeding company, which has 11 products to be released commercially in the next five years.

As well as working full-time in the business themselves, Mark and Merridee employ 11 staff including two “and a bit” full-time equivalents for each of the farm and seed cleaning enterprises, two for the machinery import business, another in administration and an engineer.

Looking forward Mark said Australia, and the grains industry in particular, needed to do more market development in the face of increased global competition. “We, as an industry, have got it a bit wrong — we talk about agronomy and production and high yields, but what’s the point of doing that if we can’t sell it?” he said.

As for the beer, he admitted it was a “hard gig” with it costing about $50 a carton to produce in addition to freight and other costs. The carton sells for $75, so “there’s not much in it”. “But money is not the only reason I do it. It’s to lift our profile and to show people there are ways of getting things out there,” he said.

Cheers to that.