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(clapping) Thanks Sharlene.
Today I am going to take you back to the paddock. There has been a lot of talk over
the last few days about climate, climate change and the
umbrella perspective of what Australia has to do to increase
productivity. And I'm here as a producer
to show you how our farm's risk management approach
is addressing climate variability.
My husband, Simon and I moved back
into farming in 1998.
We are dry land farmers from Western, Victoria, and we farm
3,000 hectares of land.
Our land is spread across a 60 kilometer
North, South range,
and so I will talk about that a bit further on. We're dry land
farmers, we farm wheat, bali, lentals, chickpeas and
canola. And this year we have actually also planted
some fava beans. Our business has a focus on
growing grain, and are focused on selling grain. We have a
focus on productivity, and a focus on profitability.
We've spent a lot of time establishing the business
model for our farm. And we work our
farm with 1.2 labour units.
My husband Simon is the 1 and I think I'm the .2
It's a very lean structure, and we've
constructed it like on purpose. We contract our
harvesting. And we bring in casual labour during seeding.
And during harvest.
Climate variability in the form of extreme weather events has impacted on or business significantly
over the past years. The 13 drought years that
we farmed for, have included extreme frost events, heat events,
and rainfall, during critical production times,
that have effected the productivity and profitability of our enterprise.
There is a need for change for farmers. We need to increase
our productivity. Our margins are increasingly
tighter. We need to increase scale to rain competitive
and the number of people on the land is steadily decreasing,
which has a social impact within our community
as well as limiting the people resource that we have available to actually
work on our farm. We need to adapt to these changes
in increasingly dryer, warmer and volatile climate during our critical growing
season. How do we address this change?
On our farm we address this change with knowledge. Knowledge lets us
grow more at less cost with less risk.
And we do this by understanding our inputs, our weather
and our markets. We farm
by fact. Before we put a seed in the ground or
establish our cropping rotation, we do soil tests
right across our farm in every paddock. We test for phosphorous, we test for
nitrogen, and we test for moisture. And this makes sure that we no
longer look at a paddock and have a gutt feel about what that paddock might
be and than establish what we are going to plant in it. We know exactly
what the moisture content is, the phosphorous content and the nitrogen content
in that paddock. And this is
actually been interesting over past years, because we have had
an increasing amount of rainfall over summer. And we have thought when
we've looked at paddocks, that there would be some moisture in those paddocks before we
plant a crop. But testing has demonstrated that actually there was 0 moisture.
And that really effects what crop we plant in what paddock.
It's the side effect of the
this, has also been that we have 13 year
carbon history of our soil. And we can demonstrate
that over our farming practices over these years
and the improved practices that we have been
practicing, have increased
soil content in our properties.
And while we don't have any use for this knowledge at the moment it's
a really, in my understanding is, it's going to be a really useful bank of knowledge
to have into the future. We use
variable rate technology on our farm to drive crop performance.
and reduce input cost, that allows up to put
seed and fertilizer in
to the ground where we need it and when we need it. Yeild
maping is a measuring tool that allows us to better understand
our paddocks. And we do contract
out our harvesting. And that allows us to use new technology every year.
For us, newer technology equals reliability.
It also equals lower emissions.
We have moved to a no tool farming sysytem
and that's 1 way that we have
decided to address the health of our soil because
we do regard our soil as 1 of our most precious resources. And
no tool farming really aims to
address the health of our soil.
We have moved over the last 13 years from
steering the tractors ourselves to a guidance
system, into auto steer, and now we have
inter-row sowing, made possible through advances in technology.
And that's actually really exciting, 'cause what that means is we can
sow a seed; I don't know if any of you know what a canola seed looks like?
but it looks like a poppy seed on your bread. We can sow that
seed within 3cm accuracy on our farm.
It's made a huge
performance diffence to our enterprise.
It's had some effects that we expected. And it's had some effects that
we haven't expected. 1 of the the great advantages of
inter-row sowing, is that you just sit in the tractor
...
It's like the Starship Enterprise, and there's lots of things happening there and you just sit there and make sure
if an alarm goes off you know what's happening, or otherwise the tractors steering
itself around our paddocks. They know where to go, they know what to sow.
What that's done for us is reduced operator fatigue, which
has allowed us to use minimum labour units on our
farm. It's also meant decreased inputs, because we know exactly
where we are putting our seed and fertilizer
so we have reduced overlay. And what it's also allowed us to do
is really cool things, like sow our lentils
into our cereal crops, and what we would do
is sow a lentil in that row, between
those rows, and that will allow the lentil, which is like
a creepy little ferny plant, to climb up the
last year's stubble. And that means
that the lentil gets more sun, which means
it will flower more and produce more seed. It also means it gets more
air flow through it. Which will decrease
desease. That
leads to our use of new a better seed. And this year has been
a really interesting year for us. Over our harvest period
we experienced a lot of rainfall.
Annual rainfall total on our farm is 400mil
and over the harvest season
we got 385 mill of rain.
And that wasn't soft gentle rain, that was hard hammering rain.
And what that did was a few things to our crop. It
firstly decreased the quality of the crop, because it casue dis-colouring,
and a change in the
protein and moisture content of all of our grain.
But what it also did was hammered our lentils off their vine
onto the ground. So this year we
were using a new variety of seed called Flash.
And when we compared the outcome of our new variety
of seed Flash with the old variety of lentil Digger
that we used, we worked out that we got a 20% better return
on the new variety of seed than the old variety. And I think that,
demonstrates to us the importance of research and development
in creating new varieties of seeds for us to use on our farm.
To make those productivity increases.
Weather is very
important to a farmer, and the old
saying is you always know farmer's kids because they stop talking when the weather comes on.
We have our farms spread over a
North, South geographic spread, and that was very purposeful
for us, because we regard that as managing risk.
We're managing weather, and we are managing risk. We have a significant
rainfall difference between our Northernmost farms and our Southmost farms.
We have a soil type difference which allows us to grow a
variation of crops, that we would be unable to grow.
And there is a far diminished frost risk in the Southernmost farms.
compared with the Northernmost farms. The impact of
extreme weather events causes a huge variation in crop
performance as a result of climactic condition. Dry, frost, heat
and rain events during peak production and harvesting times.
We are getting smarter about managing events such as frost. We understand
that into the future we will be having more frost events
and we are looking towards new varieties of grain that allow us to manage
our varying weather, in the light of climate variability.
We also use models daily,
to predict and understand short term weather patterns. And
where that has significance for us, is it makes no difference
to us if in 2 days there's... when we putting our
grain in the ground if there is a hot spell for two days.
What makes the difference is during spraying and
peak growing times is if there is going to be a window
for us to get on our crops
to spray them or to roll lentils. Also just in time
application of nitrogen fertilizer needs to be just
before a rain event. So accurate forecasting
of weather is critical to our enterprise and managing risk
around our inputs.
Marketing our grain to us is as important as growing it. And this
is where our enterprise increases it's profitability.
We understand the cost of production and realistically target our prices
to achieve profits. We actively use on farm storage
as part of our marketing stragegy. We have 7.5 thousand ton
of, on farm storage. And you can see it's quite a significant
silo complex that we have on our property.
We believe that it results in an average increase of 10% return
in a production year. And an example of how we use this
marketing strategy to increase our profitability
is in 2005 it was a great production year.
We produced more grain than we ever have before, but prices were
extremely low. So we put our grain in our silos
and contemplated what we were going to do with it, and then
2006 was a drought year. Our production was less
that we had ever grown before, but prices were fantastic.
So we sold our 2005 crop into the 2006
market, achieving a better
than average profit for both years. An example
of this marketing strategy was this year
as I said we got a lot of rain over our
harvest period. And
were we gained an advantage through having our
storage on farm, was that we had
a header going flat out. We had lots of grain, lots of grain this year.
And we had a header going flat out, now we had two trucks
emptying grain out of that header and running it back to our silos, so basically
between rain events it was critical that we got our harvestor
onto our farm and when it got bogged we had someone
there to pull it out, an then we'd go a bit further and it got bogged and we had someone there to pull it out, but
we had trucks running
backwards and forwards to our silo delivering grain back onto our farm.
And you may wonder what impact that has?
But if I tell you that if you delivered your grain
into the bulk storage system this year, you had a 3 and a half
hour wait at those silos to deliver your grain.
Now if your truck isn't the paddock for your header to put you grain
into it and there is a rain even coming and you know that rain event
will diminish significantly the quality and quantity of your crop
there is an issue.
And we also used technology to remain nibble
in our paddock. We constantly would
get text messages and use
iphone tehnology to understand
world prices for our grain so we know where and when to sell
it at the time. We see the future,
for farmers as full of exciting opportunites.
The challenge is for policy makers, scientist and growers
to continue to work together to respond to the change in climate,
market conditions and increasing global poputions. Thank you.
(clapping)