Running a harvester backyards and forwards over an area of country to pack it down is one of the sacrifices David Storey has made to help the cropping industry in Central Queensland.
Mr Storey and his brother Alan run a cropping and livestock enterprise north and south of Capella, where they farm around 3200 hectares of country and run livestock on another 1000ha.
Their main summer crop is sorghum, while wheat and chickpeas make up the winter crop rotation.
One of the major challenges in their production system is getting water into the ground.
“We seem to be getting on top of this more these days with control traffic and zero till,” Mr Storey said.
“The next thing after water is the fertility of the soil and just how we are going to tackle that is going to be our next major problem.”
The Storey enterprise moved over to control traffic conservation farming about 12 years ago.
They run the control traffic system on multiples of nine, spraying on 27 metres, planting 18m and harvesting on nine metres, with the wheel tracks three metres apart.
“We converted a chisel plough and cultivators across to zero till under a DPI trial and we thought we would try and do a little bit just for the trial,” Mr Storey said.
“Once we converted gear over it was just as easy to do the whole farm under a no till controlled traffic system.”
This has lead to trial work to determine the true value of a controlled traffic system in the soils around Capella.
The Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation (DEEDI) has started a compaction trial with the assistance of the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC).
The aim of the trial is to put the header tracks outside of the controlled traffic system by running it randomly across a paddock and determining what damage that is doing.
“They ran the header backwards and forwards to deliberately compact a large area to see what the difference will be at harvest time, but the country wasn’t wet when we did it,” Mr Storey said.
“One of the biggest arguments with growers is that the header doesn’t do any compaction when the ground is hard, so we are just trying to see what is really going on.”
This is different to when a header has been run over a wet paddock. In these paddocks the root system of the next crop doesn’t get going quite as well.
“You can often see tracks across our control traffic system where something heavy has driven across,” Mr Storey said.
“I know when we had to harvest across the slope one year to pick up wheat which had fallen over we could still see those tracks for seven to 10 years.
“It was a long time afterwards and if you had the right light in the paddock, you could pick up where these old compaction tracks were with that very wet harvest.”
While the trial only started after the 2009 sorghum harvest, Mr Storey is still confident something is happening in the soil.
“I’m sure there is still something going on under the soil with some damage happening,” he said.
The results from year one are expected in the near future.
There is also a second research trial underway on the Storey’s property.
The Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM) has installed flumes at the end of contour banks to determine the amount of water running off the paddocks and the amount of nutrients and chemicals being taken in the water.
The flumes have been set up on a single, a double and a triple contour bay to see the difference in sediment movement down the slope and off the paddock from the different size bays.
“It’s not only sediment but also fertilisers and also pesticides as well so the flumes are checking for all of these things,” Mr Storey said.
“We want the chemical and fertiliser to stay in the paddock and no one else wants it in the environment and it’s good to know what is actually happening.
“If we can prove we don’t need so many contour banks because of the way we are farming now, with controlled traffic and zero till, there are savings there in less maintenance and wear and tear on machinery as well as less contour bank maintenance.
“I know some people have done away with contour banks and it doesn’t seem to be too detrimental to the paddocks but it would be nice to have some figures behind that before we look at removing the banks.”
This is not the first trial work the Storey brothers have been involved with, having trials on their properties since 1997.
They’ve been innovators with nitrogen fertiliser, controlled traffic farming and the spraying out of sorghum plants before harvest.
“I don’t think we would still be farming if we were still conventionally farming on this country,” Mr Storey said.
“We’ve started getting yields that my father and his father got when they first started farming in this country.
“We have been able to bring the yields back up again plus we get a lot more crops then we previously did and we’re making opportunities for ourselves.”
On the issue of local research, Mr Storey said it’s very important to get the funding from the GRDC.
“It’s just a great way to get information across to growers, having a trial area and having an extension officer going out and having a shed meeting with other growers to share data that has been collected,” he said.
“Growers can come and see what other growers are doing and it is amazing how much we learn from each other and we discuss what worked and what didn’t work.”
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