Mixed farming: Luke and Prue Milgate from Serpentine mixes it with the best

GRAZING crops add another layer to the interesting commodity mix on the Milgate’s Serpentine farm, writes DALE WEBSTER

New crop: Luke Milgate, with son Alexander, on the family’s farm at Serpentine in central Victoria. Picture: Dale Webster

MOST people with a mixed sheep and cropping enterprise tend to lean one way or another.

But Luke and Prue Milgate, of Ettrick Farms at Serpentine in central Victoria, are successfully weaving the two commodities into a finely balanced whole.

They run a flock of 2500 Merino and first-cross ewes and crop about 900ha each year. The combination of grain sales, the breeding of ewe lambs, wether and second-cross lamb sales over the hook and an annual wool clip provides a steady bottom line for the family enterprise.

But it was when Luke introduced grazing crops to the mix last year that the separate parts of the system really started to sing to the same tune.

“If you can get a double bite of the cherry with your grazing and then get your grain unit at the other end, you’re always going to be in front once you work your gross margins out,” Luke said.

Luke learned about grazing crops working with a PhD student while studying for his agronomy degree at Charles Sturt University at Wagga Wagga, in NSW.

He credits his decision to move interstate to do the course, seven hours from his family farm at Minyip, for expanding his outlook and developing his capacity to solve problems.

For him, the introduction of grazing crops made sense when faced with a feed gap in late autumn, even though the practice was not that common in central Victoria.

“There’s no point just saying that something is not going to work,” he said. “I knew that grazing crops worked but I thought ‘let’s have a go and see if it works for us’.”

SPREAD HIS WINGS

LUKE sowed a long-season wheat variety, wedgetail, in that first year and grazed the crop twice before taking it through to harvest.

The wheat yielded 5.2 tonnes/ha and during the year also provided a bulk of feed to grow young lambs on in a tough, wet year that saw two floods affect nutritional quality.

When the ewe lambs were sold at Ballarat special sale in January, they averaged $200, which was at the higher end of the market.

On the back of that success, the Milgates have again incorporated grazing crops into their annual program this year, which they should have all planted by the end of this month. They have sown wedgetail again and added a clearfield grazing canola into the mix.

All going well they will be harvesting 465ha of canola, 180ha of wheat, 130ha of barley and 80ha of faba beans come spring-summer, aiming for a total yield of about 2575 tonnes.

Luke said there was no “hard and fast” rotation, with decisions made based on what suited paddocks best.

The soil on the property, which the Milgates farm with Prue’s parents, Garry and Kaye Addlem in a 400-450mm annual rainfall zone 50km northwest of Bendigo, is acidic, ranging from sand and loams to heavy clay.

TECH HEADS

A LOVER of gadgets and all things technical, Luke has begun yield mapping, electromagnetic soil testing and is working thought the process of deciding whether variable rates for sowing or input application is a track he wants to go down.

“We’re doing variable rate lime in a couple of paddocks to manage our acidity but we’re not doing variable rate seeding at the moment because I don’t have enough data.

“We’ve only been yield mapping for two years — one year was a flood year and one was a very dry year — and you can’t base agronomic decisions on that.

“But it’s something we are playing with and trying to work out whether it’s economic to do.”

The cropping system is minimum till and Luke prefers to retain as much stubble as he can to provide the right “microclimate” for sowing.

The sheep are grazed on the stubble but he is careful to manage the length of time they are on it to avoid paddocks being powdered up.

While there though, the sheep add value, keeping down weeds, eating out areas that are too tight for sowing and cleaning up anything that came out of the back of the harvester that might attract mice or other pests.

When not on crops or stubble, the sheep graze a mix of dryland and irrigated lucerne pastures that make up about 50 per cent of the farm.

LAMB ROAST

THE Milgates aim to turn off lambs at 26kg or more and as part of refining how they get to that, have decided to introduce supplementary feeding this year.

“We had a few issues last year because, although there was a lot of grass around, there just wasn’t the value in the feed,” Luke said.

“We were wondering why our lambs weren’t doing well but weren’t proactive enough at feed testing our pastures to make sure we were getting the nutrition right — we worked it out after the fact.

“Going into this year we thought we’ve got to keep our ewes going and hopefully give the lambs the best start.

“When you look at genetics, 75 per cent of your genetic gain is nutrition-based, so if you feed them right, they will perform.

“Hopefully with supplementary feeding in conjunction with grazing crops we can get the growth rates out of them and get them turned off the way we want them without having to lot feed them.”

For Luke and Prue as a young couple starting a family — son Alexander arrived just under a year ago — diversity suits their lifestyle and gives them security.

Prue is just as active on the farm as Luke, taking the lead in the management of the sheep alongside her father, while also balancing roles on the board of the North Central Catchment Management Authority, agricultural advisory groups and local management committees.

“It’s always good to have a diverse enterprise mix,” Luke said.

“Generally, when one is down the other one is up — it’s taking the peaks and troughs out of our bottom line.

“This year sheep and wool are quite good but crops are low so we are going to make more money out of sheep than we will out of crop — that helps with balancing the books.”