MOTHER Nature can be a harsh teacher. Tim Linnan from Lake Clarendon, near Gatton has taken the lessons served up to him and put them to good use.
"One thing the drought did show us was how to use trickle irrigation," Tim said. Today, about 90 percent of his mixed small cropping farm is under trickle irrigation.
He has about 6 hectares (15 acres) under Cherry and Golden Grape tomatoes, which is more of a "fill in" crop, just enough to keep his full-time workers going through the holiday period.
Tim is a fifth-generation farmer in the region who now operates in conjunction with his father Tom, his brother Bruce, and in more recent years, Tim's own son Thomas.
They supply some of the major supermarket chains with a range of produce including broccolini (about 40 hectares grown for Perfection Fresh).
They label their produce as Maragi Pty Ltd. They also have about 10,000 stone fruit trees including peaches and nectarines.
The need to become more efficient in irrigation sparked an all-round realisation for Tim on other areas in which gains could be made.
He recently invested in two new tractors and has had both equipped with GPS guidance systems.
While having only had them about a month, according to Tim, he could already see the savings being made in time by forming multiple beds at once, and in fuel through efficiencies in doing "one pass".
In the nature of zero-till cropping, from now on the tractors will stick to sets of drive tracks cutting down on the overlap.
"You don't realise how much plants don't like being where the tractor has driven," Tim said.
He notes that while precision agriculture has its place, to do it properly is not cheap.
"If you can afford to do it, it's great. But it's always the money factor," he said.
The Linnans are lucky in that their bore water is considered clean, meaning it needs minimal filtration before being pumped through the system, and is ideal suited to fertigation.
Their last significant rain for the year was in May, however they are in a better position heading into the summer of 2009 than they have been for the past few years.
"We were fortunate because last year we got all that rain in November," Tim said.
This helped eased the pressure on their water catchments and he said they aren't too thirsty just yet.
The move to trickle irrigation has also given the Linnans more impact for every drop they use.
"It's just so much more efficient. We were sort of forced into it because nature told us to," Tim said.
But the hope of a wet Christmas is never far away.
"We could do with some rain. Could always do with some rain," he said.
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