Sowing all the go with end in sight
Seeding has hit fever pitch across western Victoria in recent weeks and we are now coming towards the tail end of another sowing period.
After starting from well back in the field with a list of jobs as long as their arms, all the while unsure of what autumn was going to deliver weather wise, growers have risen to the task.
They have come home with a wet sail with crops going in – in a very timely fashion – and the finish line well and truly in sight.
The way the mop has flopped during the past six to eight months has seen one major task merge into the next for many grain growers, calling on multitasking skills to be applied, or learnt for those who prefer to complete one task before beginning another.
This has left farmers wondering: ‘Has it just been the season, or is this just what I do now?’
It is a sign of the times and with properties forever expanding and what seems to be a continually diminishing workforce, the latter is increasingly true.
Fortunately for the family farmer, consistent rain has forced machinery to a halt at regular intervals, encouraging some down time and keeping marital relations below the detonation threshold as opposed to simply being passing ships in the night.
With a drawn-out hay season and harvest in 2016 leading straight into 2017 paddock preparation, which incidentally required a lot more effort and stubble burning this year due to the increased bulk left behind from last year’s harvest, tractors began rolling with flames lapping at their tyres.
Sowing is now running head on into the beginning of the top-dress and post-emergent spray season with early-sown crops in northern regions, canola in particular, bolting out of the ground after good rain and relatively warm conditions for this time of the year.
With crops emerging swiftly, growers have had to retrace their tracks before they even finish putting the crop into the ground to ensure that mice, slugs and insects are not undoing any of their hard work.
It is another sign of the times that preventatives such as seed treatments, mice and slug bait have largely become a fixed cost of production and the rule rather than the exception.
The cost of such measures is a much easier pill to swallow than the heartache, time and money associated with the possibility of having to re-sow patches at a later time.
Despite the best efforts of growers, mice in particular have still been able to penetrate defences to cause frustration in some areas.
Graziers have also seen an early flush of green feed unlike anything they have seen for quite some time, helping to maintain stock condition – to the point that early-morning rounds are spent on the edge of the driver’s seat and with a hint of uneasiness around the size of some of the offspring they might encounter, from day to day.
Fortunately, autumn progeny hitting the ground unscathed have been given a favourable start to life, which will no doubt help them fend off the approaching cold winter conditions.
The season is already poised to where it could become seriously wet seriously quickly or lull everyone into a false sense of security before falling off the wagon and becoming dry later in the year.
This is hardly a profound statement because all you have to do is look out midbirth, the window to observe the conditions. And let’s be honest, every season can be wet or dry.
However, from what the start of the season has delivered, there is a noticeable level of ambiguity as to what it means for the remainder of the year and growers are acutely aware that in the modern age, wet can be wet, dry most certainly means dry and normal is perhaps an extinct concept.
One can only hope that we continue to exist in the current sweet spot that has been served up for the first half of this year.