Planting Cane .

Started planting cane yesterday, had the usual glitches, we have changed the way the planter feeds billets and have had to recalibrate the drive to achieve the billet density that we want.This meant altering the billet length as well because we doubled the number of flights that pick up the billets, a bit of trial and error but we are pretty happy with what we have now , I suppose we will see what the emergence looks like, that will be the ultimate measure of success.Once we got things sorted we are planting around 10 Ha per day, this is my brother and I and our Dad drives the haulout for us while we cut the billets to plant. The tractor has three tanks fitted , the first large white tank is for liquid fertiliser, the second is for fungicide,and the ones on the planter are for insecticide (crickets and wire worm). We originally bought this planter in 1988 as a single furrow billet planter at 1.53m centres, in 2007 we converted it to what you see now two row double disc opener on 2m wheel centres.

Preparing to plant Cane.

Well the weather is finally starting to look more like a normal winter pattern, and although we could not autumn plant we now will have to spring plant it is not what we normally like to do but unfortunately farming is all about working around mother nature.It is starting to warm up enough now (soil temperature is above 20 degrees C) even though we have still had some frost on some mornings.So what we are doing now is the second last pass of cultivation that this paddock will probably see,(there will be one more pass at the out of hand stage to complete the beds) this is the bed-former we built to allow us to plant and this forms the 2m spacings for traffic, and the .8m furrows where cane will be planted. All going well I will be able to post some photo's of the billet planter in action in the next few days. Just to highlight how good this RTK steering system is checkout how the tractor is tracking in the wheel tracks that where left from spraying out the nut grass.

Harvesting Again !!!

Well it has dried out and we have been harvesting again, since the end of last month the weather outlook looks fine from here on fingers crossed. Controlled traffic really pays off especially when you have the rain that we have had, even though the ground is still wet the compacted wheel tracks act like gutters and the larger uncompacted growing area has better internal drainage. Because we have around 25 Ha ratooning we have applied some nutrient this has been applied in a liquid form and is a by-product from the distilling process for Bio-fuel, this is part of our nutrient plan and we plan to add the total required amount in another two applications at later stages of crop growth. It has been shown that split applications is more economical, and effective with less potential for offsite environmental impacts. These further applications will be done with our variable rate controlled spray/applicator that I have posted photo's of previously. The photo's I have attached are of the contractor (the only thing we don't do), and the product applied onto the trash blanket it is applied under positive pressure.