Marnoo farmer’s crops defy tough season despite up to 30 per cent frost damage
Despite sub-zero temperatures and untimely rains hammering his crops, Marnoo’s Trent Carter expects his barley to deliver extraordinary six-tonne yields.
Marnoo farmer Trent Carter says his crops are still holding on, defying what has otherwise been a brutally tough season.
He said had the rainfall that arrived about four weeks ago been just a little bit earlier it could have been a complete game changer for the season.
However, he was grateful all the same with the 18mm of rain that fell at the time, and was followed with smaller intermittent amounts of 3mm, 4mm and 5mm.
“If that initial rain was just a couple of weeks earlier it would have been better,” he said. But then the season could have gone down the drain more than it had.
Trent, who grows 2500 hectares of winter crops and another 800ha of hay and fodder, and runs 3500 breeding ewes, said he was still hopeful about how his Cyclops barley would perform.
“The barley is all on heavy black soil and it was sown into a lentil stubble, while there is a couple of crosses against it, it should still yield well,” he said.
Trent said he hoped the barley would yield from 6 tonnes a hectare to 6.5 tonnes a hectare.
He said crops at his place were hit by a frost a couple of weeks ago and there were some yield losses of about 20 per cent to 30 per cent as a result.
“The temperatures went below -2C for about two hours,” he said.
However, the evening before the frost it had been raining and that added to the woes of the frost.
The cutting of cereal crops has already started, and then there was canola to windrow, in the next 10 to 14 days, before moving onto the barley.
“The barley is probably about three weeks away from harvest,” he said.
