Our mixed grain and sheep farm is a family-run business based at Boyup Brook, 260 kilometres southeast of Perth in the Great Southern region that we operate with our son, daughter and son-in-law, together with a full-time worker and seasonal casuals.
1800 ha was sown this year, a mix of mainly canola & barley and some wheat together with oat areas for fodder which we completed by 1 June. Our canola was sown from 19 April and has established well despite the protracted dry and lack of summer moisture, with barley emerging late but promising. The soil types are mixed with forest gravels and gravel loams the dominant types.
Our annual rainfall is around 650 mm but we’ve waited until June for a true break this year. Working on improving surface water management in the dry years of 2017 to 2020 and setting up reliable confinement areas for stock has again proven beneficial. We have 8,000 breeding ewes lambing down on 1 July, together with a further 4000 adult merinos so our lupin& hay feeding regime has been constant.
On the labour front we are constantly understaffed, mainly since COVID. We have the Greenbushes lithium mine in our patch and high demand for staff in shearing sheds and that’s making experienced casual labour hard to find locally but we’re seeing international workers returning slowly.
We enjoy hosting tertiary students studying agriculture, providing them with a taste of rural life, some returning for some casual work in the busy times. Its enormously satisfying seeing their progress in our industry.
Other challenges arise from having another farm 65 km away. It is a balance between investing in extra on-farm machinery and being over-capitalised and the logistical task of moving machinery efficiently between farms and running the risk of being in the wrong place at times. The IT demands with newer machinery seems inherently stressful and we constantly need technical support to make even new machinery work efficiently. However, we have a management succession plan developing within the family to ease out the oldies in the next 5 years!
We appreciate the initiatives and leadership of GrainGrowers for our industry. In Western Australia, GrainGrowers has been most supportive of the Women in Farming organisation, which I Chair, enhancing knowledge and skills of 250 members across 12 Branches in our rural areas.