Harvest not far away.

Well it is only a couple of weeks until the 2012 harvest starts, we have just had 40mm of rain and it has been followed up by some cold weather it was 6 degrees Celsius this morning, looks like winter has arrived. The cane harvester is finished and ready to go, just a few little maintenance jobs to do on the transporters, it looks to be a good crop this year and "touch wood" there is still a good sugar price on the horizon. We have not been able to plant cane yet as the rain has held everything up probably not a bad thing considering the temperature has plummeted.Haven't really got any more machinery to show you guys I have pretty much shared all the stuff we have on the go.So this time I will put on a couple of photo's of some of the feral pigs that run a muck in our sugar cane crops, it"s not what they eat that is the problem it is what they destroy and root up that causes the biggest issue.

Wow it's been a week.

Man time flies , I have almost got the caneharvester back in one piece, it's good to see less parts on the shed floor I can tell you. It was interesting to me when I was on my travels that us Australians were seen as a pretty inovative bunch of farmers, and I suppose that we have to be given our circumstances regarding government policy, climatic conditions, and relying on exporting so much of what we produce. The other thing that was glaringly obvious was even though not perfect, our research and development organisation are world class, and some of the technology that I have shared on this blog is a direct result from this industry wide investment. I will attach a couple of photo's of our shielded spray/liquid fertiliser applicator.This is new technology developed by Trimble that allows us to control three different sections all at different rates at the same time. We use roundup under the shields in the interspace, a herbicide over the rows, and the third tank we use liquid fertiliser to split applications, this is all done throught the main screen in the tractor, and my brother has mounted all of the electronic control gear with the tractor so we can use different implements with the one set of controllers/manifolds.

Levelling again.

The ground has finally dried out enough to start levelling again , and ther is still a fair bit of dirt to shift. As soon as the levelling is done we will be applying gypsum via a variable rate controlled spreader, that will use a prescription that we have made using data from an (Electromagnetism Map) or em map and data from our gis marked soil samples.This technology allows us to pin point soil ameliorant to where it is needed most and to apply less to the soils that are in better shape, this adds up to quite significant cost reductions.Electronic data management is an emerging technology and we see it as a tool to fine tune our farming management, we use "Yeild Monitoring" on our sugarcane harvester, E,M maps, GIS soil samples, we use this data to build layers of information about paddocks over time so we can see trends, and monitor our management practices. This data collection program also lets us track all costs (tractors, harvesting, hauling, fertiliser, chemical, labor) as well as a complete record of what was done on farm from day to day, ie; chemical application , fertiliser application,water application etc, we have found this type of information invaluable in managing our farm finances, as my Dad always says " If you don't know where you spend money you can't workout where to save it!" here is a digital image from our E M map, and the cover of the Ontario grain Farmer Magazine.

70 mm goes a long way

We ended up getting 70 mm of rain which brought the land levelling to a screeching halt,we still can't get back on the paddock. When I went to have a look the next morning I thought that there would be some water in the pit, but did not expect a METER of water. My Nuffield study topic is intercropping , and in our case we have been experimenting with soybean as a sacrificial nitrogen source and an alternative for hebicide, due to the soy's shading out the interspace.We have been trying to understand (since 2002) the management between these two , we only used soy because we had the seed and thought we would give it a crack, but there are probably other legumes that might be better.There appears to be a lot of benefits to such a system, some things that we observed were, a lot more soil born activity ie; worms, beetles , centipedes, even with one fifth of applied nitrogen compared to the control the crop out yeilded in tonnes of sugar per hectare, and there were considerable costs reductions , applied fertiliser (one fifth) and herbicde was nil. The planter that was on the last blog is the one that will be used to plant interrow for the intercrop.