Friday, 27 April 2012
Raining
Well as predicted it is raining , hopefully it will clear out tomorrow, it is not what we need at the moment as we are still trying to prepare land to plant cane.
I thought I would outline some of the minimum till planting operations that we have moved to and show you guys a couple of the no till planters ,one we have had made the daybreak soy planter, and the billet cane planter that we redesigned and built to plant through crop residue. These planters are integral to our farming operation as we have moved to this new farming system, which as I discovered had it origins at CYMMIT in Obregon Mexico, from Dr Ken Sayer.While this sounds like a fairly straight forward concept, it has taken us 10 years to get to the point where we can implement all four priciples of conservation farming, which are, Contolled Traffic (RTK GPS and all axle widths match row spacings), Cover Crops (Legumes), Minimum Tillage, Crop Residue retention(ground cover). It is a system that delivers costs savings, builds soil health, over time improves production, and importantly has less potential for off site environmental impacts. I will add a photo of our Daybreak disc planter for soy. I will attempt a link to a You Tube video of our minimum till cane planter://www.youtube.com/user/Granfarm1/feed">
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
Almost Finished
The recycle pit is almost finished, hopefully tomorrow, as rain is forcast for Friday!! It is amazining just how much dirt has to be shifted to build this resevoir. We have put the extra pipeline in and it has been covered and is ready to go.
I have started back in the shed reassembling our cane harvester, replacing bearings and roller drives, it is one of those jobs that you just have to keep at I suppose. Not much more has been happening.
Sunday, 22 April 2012
More Digging
It will be pretty hard to match the posts that I
have done from around the world and all of the great things that i have seen but I have decided to keep updating my blog with what my farming plans and systems involve with day to day stuff, hopefully you guys will find it interesting. Our recycle pit will be finished in a couple of days and I am digging a trench to extend some underground mains to take full advantage of the additional capacity we will have to irrigate, the underground pipe is 300mm diameter and we are extending it by 100 meters this allows us to have more artifical head (pressure)above the paddock. This allows for more inflow rate so we can apply water down the furrow for a shorter period, putting the right amount of water at the right time.
The paddock will be levelled with some pretty high tech gear, it is actually all done with satellites now (it used to be laser)that control the scoop behind the tractor, it is actually all multiplane and the program used provides a design to move minimal soil. Yes I know this is not a good thing to move so much soil , biology suffers, soil compaction, to name just two negatives, but unfortunately this is a necessary evil to get us to a permanent bed, controlled traffic, min till production system. After this pit has been finished and the paddock graded it will not be tilled again as we go through the process I will document the stages here if you guys are interested.
Tuesday, 17 April 2012
Home
Well I have been home for almost 2 weeks now and have finally made the effort to update my blog. I have to say not having been overseas before it has been a whirlwind, I actually can't believe that it was me in all those places around the world. I will say that after spending every waking hour with my travel companions for 7 weeks to not being with them was a strange feeling,so thanks guys it was a great group to travel with and definitely made my first overseas adventure more enjoyable.
The one thing that stood out everywhere we travelled was the importance of water, and since being home we have undertaken a water recycling project for one of our paddocks, it is a pretty big exercise, and we have got some contractors in to shift around 23000 cubic meters of soil, this will gives us the capacity to keep all water on farm and to maximise our irrigation effeciencies
Sunday, 1 April 2012
last days in Brazil.
Well the end is near, I am in the airport at Sao Paulo waiting to fly to Santiago Chile have decided to catch up with the last days events.We travelled to Ubereba the beef capital of Brazil to look at artificial insemination facility and semen collection .Man there were some big animals out there these big boys have the life we were told that they are worth up to $400,000 , and are treated like kings. The whole process is pretty close to a Friday night at the local pub, the maiden heifers are paraded around to get the bulls going , I probably don't need to go into anymore detail ,"you get the picture" . It was a pretty interesting visit even considering I am not a cattleman.
Our last visit of the trip was a 3rd generation family farm that started with 60 ha and produced a small amount of milk from his small dairy heard, he now has his 4 sons involved and farms around 2000 ha with crops including coffee, sugarcane, soybeans,sorghum,corn,sillage,as well as having fish farming ponds and running a 1100 cow dairy. The best part of his diversification was a sugarcane rum distillery which is a traditional Brazilian rum called Ca Sash A I don't know the proper spelling but that it how it sounds.
Anyway homeward bound now, and Rhys kindly worked out that I have a travel time of 41 hrs until I get in to Townsville.
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