LIKE many dryland farmers on the Central Highlands, Merv Bourne is in full flight planting his summer crop.
More than 200,000 hectares of summer crop is expected to be planted on the Central Highlands, with most to be sorghum and the rest largely corn, mungbeans and sunflowers.
Conditions are hot and rain has been patchy, but on the whole soil moisture is good.
Mr Bourne farms the 1308ha Undara West with his wife Leanne at Mt McLaren, north of Clermont, where they grow summer and winter crops on about 1212ha.
They are in the midst of planting a summer crop of 280ha Crystal mungbeans and 500ha of Buster and Pioneer G99 sorghum, and will look to plant 50ha of corn next month.
Mr Bourne has also planted a trial crop of about 40ha of guar (clusterbean) which ? should it be successful ? he hopes could be a viable rotational crop.
Mr Bourne first moved to Central Queensland in 1981 as a contract harvester, and purchased Undara West in 1989. This year Mr Bourne plans to scale back the contract harvesting business ? which has seen him away for up to 10 months a year ? to focus more on the farm.
"I'm getting too bloody old," he laughed.
"I want to stay home and try to do the farming better."
Undara West now has a full moisture profile and Mr Bourne is optimistic a good season is in store.
Last year was good for the Mt McLaren farmer and went some way to make up for 2010, which he described as a disaster.
"2010 was a write-off; we might as well have had a drought," he said.
In 2010 Mr Bourne harvested only about 121ha of a 500ha winter chickpea crop, which was severely weather-affected, and had much of his wheat crop downgraded. From the start of 2011 things looked better, as Mr Bourne planted a sorghum crop of about 800ha, and corn crop of 150ha, both of which went on to yield 4t/ha.
The 50ha of Kyabra chickpea he planted last winter went on to yield 2.3t/ha, but the one downfall was the 150ha of Gregory wheat.
While it yielded well at 3.5t/ha, the rain of the 2010-11 summer caused the soil to leech nutrients which in turn meant Mr Bourne achieved average protein of only 10 percent. Mr Bourne is fertilising to try to combat the leeching, which he believes is also due to the fact soils in the Central Highlands are starting to age.
He is putting down 50kg/ha of sulphur and 20 l/ha of liquid Flowphos Z.
"The country is getting old and starting to get depleted; we are used to getting a free ride here," Mr Bourne said.
Last year he also put out 120kg/ha of urea on both the sorghum and wheat crops.
Mr Bourne already looks ahead to winter. He plans to put in about 363ha of Kyabra chickpeas, and will also double-crop the mungbean country back to Gregory wheat.
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