Water efficiency key to success of summer and winter crop operation at Parkes, NSW

Precision is the mantra for ‘Treen’ Swift and her family at their large and diverse cropping operation at Parkes, NSW.

Water use efficiency is undoubtedly the driver behind everything Katrina ‘Treen’ Swift and her family do on their large and diverse cropping operation at Parkes in Central West NSW.

And focusing on what they do best, as a farming enterprise and individually in their roles, is paying dividends.

Treen farms across 4000ha with her husband Mark, brother Bruce Watson and sister-in-law Karina Watson, and parents Jim and Janelle Watson.

They grow winter and summer crops with 13 different cereal, oilseed, pulse and fibre crops in their rotation. Winter cops include wheat, barley, canola, triticale, oats, lupins, faba beans, lentils, vetch, while summer crops can include sorghum, mung beans, field peas and cotton.

With Treen’s great-grandfather first settling on the Parkes farm in 1901, it traditionally ran 5000 self-replacing Merinos, Angus cattle and crops. But they transitioned to summer and winter cropping and sold the livestock, due to the changing climate and low returns for livestock.

And the juggle between harvesting a summer crop and planting a winter crop was another reason livestock no longer work in the mix.

“We could be trying to windrow, harvest, spray and plant and then if we ran into fly-blown sheep, it just was too much. So we went with summer cropping over livestock because we realised we can’t be everything,” Treen said.

Bruce and Katrina Watson and Treen and Mark Swift in on of their crops on their Parkes, NSW, property.

SOUTHERN SORGHUM

While the Parkes area hasn’t traditionally been a significant grower of dryland summer crops, careful moisture management and an increasing amount of summer rain falling in the area has helped the family discover what they can grow well.

A case in point being sorghum.

With most sorghum grown in Queensland and northern NSW, the Swift and Watson family were some of the first to grow it as far south as Parkes and now they produce a crop with an average yield of 7 tonnes/ha.

Treen said pivoting around the variance in rainfall was difficult.

She said they can get anywhere from 1000mm to under 200mm annual rainfall.

“We received 1000mm two years ago and in 2023 had 200mm from January to November, then had 400mm from November to February 2024.”

But some of the ways they were able to manage that was having a number of crops they could grow, depending on the climate and water availability, and continually working on their water use efficiency.

“We have yield targets, but it comes back to getting our water use efficiencies right, as we can measure that,” she said.

“We measure this with capacitance probe data, growing season rainfall and utilise the Fench and Schultz model to work out target yields and finesse our nutrition program.”

A GOOD FALLOW

Treen said sorghum needed a long fallow, so if the moisture wasn’t available, they could opt to plant mung beans instead of sorghum or extend the fallow.

She said they were targeting yields of 6 tonnes/ha for wheat and 4 tonnes/ha for canola in kinder years.

To monitor water usage, they have about 15 water probes, down to 1.7m, throughout the farm.

“We put them in after the noughties drought. We had been watching crops die and turn blue, so we wanted to be able to have quantitative analysis of the water available.”

“We can make quick decisions on where our bucket (soil moisture) is sitting at.”

The moisture probes have also helped them figure out what crops roots go deep.

“Traditionally we’ve been told mung beans don’t go deep, but we can see they do go down to utilise that deep soil moisture. We can see how far that profile is being drawn from.”

Deep N core soil sampling is undertaken most years, so “we can work out what is there”.

“We have a yield we are working toward and then we can feed crops fertiliser as needed.”

“Dad was pretty innovative and in 1994 and joined the Sydney Water biosolids program. We got EPA approved for a site, and we spread biosolids as needed, which is a big part of our nutrition program for soil.”

“It is constant budgeting of protein and nitrogen and putting data into the models, which is why we have good agronomists, so we know how much we can spend and what the risk profile is with that.”

They also use a 12 by 3 spacing controlled traffic system for soil health, running 25cm or 50cm rows, to fit in with the precision planting system.

The Swift and Watson family's emerging crops on their Parkes, NSW, property.

SOIL SAFETY

The family have a fairly rigorous double-break rotation, which is usually a cereal, legume and then a canola.

And the aim was to be water efficient and try to maintain ground cover.

Treen said they have a two to three year rotation planned out, which was then reviewed in January, and refined depending on the environmental factors and water at the time.

“For example, we didn’t plant chickpeas this year, we spread barley instead as we couldn’t get the planter in due to wet weather.”

She said they were working with the added challenge of having softer soils due to the change in land use in their area.

“We have a lot more water flow due to developments like the growing Parkes Solar Farm and the Special Activation Precinct and inland rail. We can’t risk losing top soil so we try to maintain ground cover.”

Flooding is also becoming more of an issue due to change in land use and we hope that water policy will catch up with managing changing overland flows.

“We had country flooded last year that hasn’t had water on it for 100 years. It will take us 10 years to redevelop our carbon levels after that.”

Either wheat or canola could be the biggest winter crop, depending on if it fits with the market and where each paddock was up to in their rotation.

While the final rotation is dependent on what the soil moisture probes show, the weed pressures were also considered.

“We don’t want resistance to weeds or pests, so anything we can do that isn’t reliant on chemistry is a good thing. We try to make good seasons count. We want to try to get air flow, sunlight and rotations right to reduce any disease,” Treen said.

“I believe we have a license to farm, so we need to do our best and make sure we are on a continuous plane of improvement. Every spray you avoid means it will benefit the bottom line and the environment,” she said.

As an example, Treen said when they planted cotton it dried up the soil moisture profile and cleaned up slugs.

“So any data, anecdotal as well, helps us have these tools to use.”

All beans, canola and sorghum are precision planted, and while wheat wasn’t yet due to the higher plant populations, they were working on it.

“Precision planting means we are getting better air flow, less fungicide use and a higher-quality product,” Treen said.

“We are starting to get the 1-2 per cent right and we can now promote individual plants in those crops.”

The Swift and Watson family's emerging crops on their Parkes, NSW, property.

TIGHT TEAM

In terms of the business, Treen said they had just gone through a corporate restructure.

Bruce is the general manager, Mark is project managing their large silo project, Karina does office management and compliance, while Treen, an agronomist, is responsible for summer crop agronomy and finance.

They use an external agronomist for winter cropping as well as have a talented team of four full-time staff, two of which are long-term employees and qualified mechanics and two younger employees.

“Everyone has specific roles, although everyone can step in and get it done when they have to push to complete tasks.”

“We are dealing with high tech and expensive machines and we want to value and retain good staff. It can cost a bit in a drought to keep permanent staff on, but I am a big believer in resilient communities. If we value staff and help build their careers, then we get a return in the work they put in and a more resilient business as well.”

They own their own headers, but use contractors as well. They also own two precision planters and two spray rigs, to give them flexibility.

Silo bags were used to store grain, but they were moving away from those due to not being able to access parts of their farm during winter because of the changing water flow.

They have just invested in 10,000 tonnes of vertical grain storage, with dryer and seed cleaner.

“We will have benefits of blending grain and management of out-loading.”

The drying facility will also help with harvesting sorghum if the end of the season is too cold and wet.

“So we can harvest the sorghum, dry it, and have certainty of production.”

With an agriculture economist background, Bruce was also responsible for marketing of grain.

Some is sold straight off the harvester, while some is sold into forward contracts. However, it depended on the markets and opening hours of silos.

“We are close to Condobolin, which is a big grain producer, so if they have had a big year, prices can drop rapidly at local silos, so we need to be able to manage that risk.”

The Swift and Watson family's emerging crops on their Parkes, NSW, property.

SCHOLARLY TRIO

While the complex and diverse nature of their cropping business keeps the family busy, both Mark and Bruce have been Nuffield Scholars, while Treen was awarded a 2024 Nuffield Scholarship supported by GrainCorp to study opportunities for artificial intelligence in agriculture.

With farm and landscape-level sustainability data of increasing interest across the supply chain, she can see potential windfalls from the integration of AI in analysing local data in improved management of natural capital, inputs and operations.

“AI has been a bit of a buzz and I was interested in how we can use it in agriculture. It is here to stay, so I want to understand it, manage it and use it for our benefit.”

Treen will travel to the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, the US, Canada, Israel and Japan, as well as within Australia, to research the capture and use of artificial intelligence in the supply chain.

She said AI could benefit the grains industry by green-on-green and green-on-brown spot spraying, or potentially using AI to measure the falling number of grains so that it is a quantitative analysis rather than something that can vary so much from sample to sample and impact the price point for each load significantly.

“Whether we utilise the deep thinking or machine learning facet of AI we have a range of areas where we can quickly analyse numbers and observations for more efficient use of our resources.”