Beans are coming through.

It's been 10 days since the beans were planted, since the photo's were taken anyway, and I have to say I am a little disappointed with the consistency of the emergence . The problem was that we didn't plant the beans sooner, the way our planter is configured the planting depth control wheel had to run over the cane that is growing, so because the cane was starting to put on stalk this meant that the depth wheel rode over, bringing the seed out of the soil. However we had 35mm of rain just the other day so when we were looking we could see beans germinating in the moist trash.We had a visit from the people from University come and have a look , so the photo's were taken by Susanne Schmidt who is leading the project.Hopefully all is not lost and we will have enough population to have a recordable difference in the treatments.We have three different nitrogen treatments across the field and two different soy seeding rates along the paddock.

Planting our Inter crop of Soybean.

It has taken ten years lots of time and money a Nuffield Scholarship overseas research, a collaboration with the University of Queensland and we have finally planted another inter cropping trial, and I was not there.I was in Brisbane attending a company directors course to be able to have a better understanding of the business of farming, it was some pretty serious stuff I would have rather have been home planting the trial, but this is something that can have as much of an effect on our business as the operational stuff that I usually do. My brother planted the trial and we were very pleased with the way the planter performed as you can see from the picture there is a lot of residue to work through, hopefully next week we will see the beans emerging.We have had 120mm of rain since my last post and are just starting to irrigate again, this time of year is peak growing time so we have irrigate as necessary, makes it hard around Christmas time but when you consider that Cane can grow up to 35mm per day here, good moisture management really pays off in the long run.Have to say even though the week in Brisbane was quite full on it was good to meet new faces and catch up with the old friends.

Irrigation scheduling .

Summer is here in a big way , we have had more than a few days over 40 degrees celcius, with a very strong southerly blowing definitely sucks the moisture out of the crop. This makes irrigation very important for crop growth and for the hip pocket, water is a very precious resource and a major input cost, so putting the right amount on at the right time to maximize returns is critical. The picture is of a evaporation pan which is a very simple device to determine how much moisture is getting pulled out via evapotranspiration and crop growth, so this is dependent on specific varieties and specific soil types so there is some calibration to be done, but once calibrated this is a very simple and cost effective way to manage crop growth. The other photo's are of gypsum being spread and incorporated on the leveled block , and in the new system existing bed, where the crop has been sprayed out and gypsum spread on the bed, because of the trash the gypsum is trapped and doesn't get blown away by wind.

Out with the Old !

Still flat out even though harvest is finished, we have managed to get the cane watered so it looks like cane now. We have come to the last block of "the Traditional" row spacing 5 foot that we have left and it has been rotary hoed out and the block is being laser leveled in preparation for the 2 meter beds to be formed and some soybean to be planted.We are also applying the second application of fertilizer along with cane grub control chemical, we have had some hot days here already and we have cracked 40 degrees already , all of the ratoon blocks have still only been watered once such is the water holding capacity that we have now.

Harvest Video

Don't know if this will work but I will give it a go, this is us harvesting 150tph (60 tpa) dual row!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnCXO0SQowA

Check this out !

If you ever wanted to see a great example of the difference between the new permanent bed farming system and traditional tillage farming this is it. Even though we have adopted the new two meter row spacing, to get to that we had to conventionally till the farm to get it over to the new system. Have a look at the two photo's the first is the tilled plant cane that has been irrigated three times, ( it is so dry because we have been harvesting everyday up until now and couldn't get to do it not ideal)and the second photo is the cane that was planted directly into the permanent beds and has only been irrigated twice, this cane was planted within days of each other.

What a month.

Well what a month it has been it has been like my life has been put into "fast forward" after our Brazilian visitors it was a couple more days in the harvester then off to Perth to give my Nuffield presentation , it was great to catch up with my mates from that year who were also presenting, it is like we all saw each other yesterday such is the bond we have from our Nuffield experience. So my presentation went well and now a lot more people realize the importance of the Sugarcane industry. Somehow I lost a day and thought I would return on Saturday but in fact would not get home until Sunday afternoon. After a long sleepless overnight flight , we pretty much traveled across the country diagonally, it was back in the harvester Monday to finish the rest of our crop. We didn't do to bad considering that we had no early plant cane and all of our crop was harvested pre 12 months of age, we averaged 105 tph or in old school 42 tons per acre @ 14.5 ccs. We had Tuesday for maintenance and then we started to harvest our neighbors farms to help them get there crop off and we have been doing that up until yesterday, our farm has suffered but we felt obliged to help our fellow farmers. Oh yeah we had a day off last Friday when we hosted some more international visitors this time from Mauritius, and Tanzania these guys were here to look at how we have adapted industry research into a new farming system and to see first hand the benefits that come from it. I have posted a photo of some of these guys inspecting our min till plant crop that still has only had two irrigation's since planting.

Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Visitors.

We last week hosted a delegation of Brazilian Sugarcane industry people these guys comprised , millers, agronomist, and agricultural engineers,they were at our farm to look at the way we have adopted new techniques to be more cost effective and to improve our production, and overall sustainability. These guys are dealing with the same pressures as we are but on a much larger scale, they are moving into more mechanization of there very large farming enterprises, the big difference with these guys is that they generally own the farms and the mills that crush the sugarcane, and plants that produce ethanol.These guys see the Australian sugarcane farming sector as the benchmark when it comes to the cutting edge of farming systems,and environmental responsibility.I am sure that it won't be long before they surpass us in this area , they seem to value, much more the role research and extension has to play in there businesses future. Once again I have to highlight the irony that I see in Australians own view of research, we have never had a delegation of Australian millers Ag engineers and people at that level of industry ever come to look at what is going on in there own backyard, we have pretty much had more interest from overseas than here in our own country!

Update on No-Till plant cane.

Just a quick update on our 2013 plant cane the new system that was planted back into the existing beds has just had it's second irrigation and the conventionally prepared field has had it's 3rd irrigation.It has been a bit slower to emerge but is really starting to kick on now that the weather is warming up more, we are quite pleased with the results so far but what really matters is what we send to the mill next year and how many dollars per hectare we get to put into our pockets. We are tracking our costs for both fields so will know exactly what the savings will be.

Sugarcane to Sugar.

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I mentioned in my last post how well the sugar mills have been performing this year , so I took the opportunity to have a guided tour through with my brother and one of our friends. It is an impressive operation when in full swing from the automation to the shear amount of volume that it pumps through in one day. This mill is "Invicta" and is 100k's from our farm, it has a through put capability (through the roller mill) of 1050 tonne per hour of sugarcane, and is the largest mill in the Burdekin and in the country I think? In a nut shell this plant squeezes the juice out of the cane, clarifies the juice, then processes juice to syrup, then seed sugar is added to grow crystal sugar from the syrup, then the sugar is put through centrifuges to spin out excess liquid (Molasses)sugar is then dried and sent to port for storage and export.The best part is that it is all powered by the fibre left from squeezing the juice out of the cane,this is called bagasse this is fed into furnaces that heat water to create steam to power turbines that generate electricity to power the whole operation, not only is the process self sufficient there is enough steam to power a 38 mega watt generator that feeds back into the electricity grid.

Busy As.

Busy time of the year at the moment , harvesting is 50% of the way through with the crush looking like being completed in the second week of October. This is a great outcome if it comes to fruition this will be a great boost for next years crop, this is a good outcome for the milling company that has put a lot of resources into the mills here to get them to a state of reliability.We are still harvesting the cane field that I have documented in this blog and it has performed better than we expected it is harvesting 133 tph at the moment and is a great outcome considering it is still not 12 months old, I have attached a photo. I also have been keeping feral pigs at bay here are two that won't bother us again.

Full Circle, Plant to Harvest.

Well if you have been looking at my blog you will have seen what has been involved in farming Sugarcane using latest research , cutting edge technology, all looks pretty easy I suppose when you see it here with a few paragraphs and a few pictures. I wish it was ! but my recent experiences has reinforced to me that this is the way to farm for us to have a future, it is about maximizing return whilst using our natural resources as efficiently as possible, sounds reasonable to me, all I have to do now is convince enough in the community that we need to be doing more than making "sugar". I am sure this is why there is now been * mills purchased by a multi- national corporation, they see that Queensland has the potential I just hope I get to share in the value adding when the opportunity comes along. Anyhow here are some pictures of the crop that I have documented in this blog, I have tried to take picture to give you the idea of the size of it, it is only 11 months old which is not optimum for harvest (should be at least 12 months)but this what happens in farming you have to work around the circumstances that you have been dealt.

2013 Plant Cane.

We applied some Liquid fertilizer today which is Van-ass mixed with Urea, which will give us around one third of the total nutritional requirements for our cane crop, this is a pretty good product as you also get micro nutrients as well as some microbes. You can see in the picture that the cane is coming along nicely and is filling in well, we are very pleased with the establishment this year and it looks as though the perseverance with the planter has payed off. This crop has still not been irrigated such is the moisture retention of the permanent no till bed, the block has been sprayed for broad leaf weeds, and that's it.We will be giving it it's first irrigation in the coming week now that it is warming up more, and it should really kick on. The harvest is progressing well the weather has been kind (so far) and the mills have been performing well, we have started to harvest the crop that we planted in spring last year it has grown well considering it is only 11 months old, this is not the ideal time to harvest it but we have no other options, it is 4m tall in the good soil, I will take a picture and add it in a later post .

V8 Supercars.

Had the opportunity to go to see Australia's premier touring cars race in Townsville this past weekend, took my 13 year old son along with me. It was a first for both of us and it was quite the experience, to see and hear theses cars up close is amazing the are based on what you can buy from the showroom (only in outward appearance)they produce 650 Horsepower have a top speed of around 260 klm / hour rev to 7500 rpm for hour on hour in race conditions, but the best thing about these amazing machines is that I grow the fuel. That's right these fire breathing cars that are driven like they are stolen, run on E 85 ETHANOL that is produced as a buy product from the sugar milling process of sugarcane, so it is pretty safe to say if these things can cop the treatment of race conditions, the showroom production models that you and I drive are very safe on this renewable fuel.Yes Sugarcane is pretty unique for we can produce , Food , Fibre % Energy ( bio fuels / co generation) and it can all be achieved as a value add process, not detracting anything from food production.

Back in the U.S.A.

If there is anyone involved in the Australian sugar Industry contemplating applying for a 2014 Nuffield Australia Farming Scholarship, sponsored by the Sugar Research & Development Corporation I highly recommend that they apply. Due to my Nuffield study travels earlier this year I was asked to be the key note speaker for the American Society of Sugarcane Technologist in Panama City Florida, to speak about the farming system that we have adopted due to the Industry research namely Sugar Yield Decline Joint Venture.This conference was attended by major equipment manufacturers John Deere, Case IH,Trimble, chemical companies and researcher from around the world. One thing was very apparent after talking with people after my presentation was how much of a high regard they had for the Australian Research and it's people , in fact they were actively seeking Australian researchers for there own industries.It was obvious that the Australian sugar industry is seen as the innovators in farming systems and the never ending drive for greater efficiency. This to me issues a very big challenge to the new model that is being adopted by our industry at the moment, it will be interesting to see if it delivers what is being promised, it seems to me that centralization is at the heart of the model, to me this is putting more distance between the research and the guys like me that have to implement it, this to me does not bode well for adoption of new research or practices. Anyway the plant cane is coming along and I have put in some pics.Photo at American conference supplied by American Sugar Journal.

Harvest Starts .

Well it's that time again,started harvesting the 2013 crop, can't believe it is that time of the year again. Tried a few different things with the feed on the machine , and it didn't pay off sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards though. I jammed the base-cutter 5 times in the first row, and headed back to the shed, it was an easy fix. I took the teeth off the base-cutter legs to cut billets for planting cane, so I did less damage to the seed cane, it fed fine in 80tph standing cane that we were cutting for seed. However when I went to cut 140tph sprawled cane today the cane just balked at the base-cutter, so I bolted the teeth back on to the base-cutter legs but I only put half on 180 degrees apart, I am trying not to restrict the width through the legs. Problem solved didn't jam for the rest of the day, it is amazing what you think will work and what actually does work.

Cane is Emerging.

The plant Cane is slowly coming after planting we have had the weather come cold , not real cold as yet but still in the 25 to 30 range but it is getting down to 8 degrees Celsius in the mornings. It is amazing to see how much more moisture the permanent bed paddock has held compared to the paddock that we had to work , in fact we have irrigated the conventional block because there would not have been enough consistent moisture to get the cane up .We have done a spray of Gramoxone to burn off the small weeds that have started to come after disturbing the soil, so in the pictures you will see a little chemical burn. The existing bed configuration has come out on top cost wise so far , by $150 per Hectare which is pretty much what we expected. That might not sound like much but that is only the saving in the planting operation, when you add $ 23 per Hectare for harvesting , and what we wills ave on tractor passes you can see that the savings start to be quite substantial.Our local Productivity guy organised a field day/ walk to expose other farmers to some of the things that we have done, there was a pretty good turn out considering they had to drive 100k's , we provided a handout detailing our actual costs, and it was interesting to see peoples reactions to what was presented.

Finished Planting .

We finished planting cane today at lunchtime, we are very pleased with the modifications we have made this year, I think we only had one choke this time which is very good considering when we first started we were choking every round.Once again it is a combination of factors that have lead us to this result, as well as the planter mod's the cane harvester has also had teeth removed from some rollers and a modification to the bottom chopper drum to stop squashing the cut billets, and where we couldn't unbolt teeth I split pvc tube and zip tied them to across the teeth to give a smooth surface and not damage eyes.Plus the fact that we are cutting 80 tonnes per Hectare plant cane that is standing for billets this year and not 180 tonnes per hectare tangled cane also should play a significant part in better plant establishment.All these things take time to workout and you have to have the weather on your side to keep plants standing, however I am feeling much more confident that we have turned the corner and have mastered the machinery necessary to farm in this new way. What is the saying 2% inspiration 98% perspiration, maybe it should be PERSISTENCE.

Minimum Till Cane Planting.

We have started to plant cane and after about 5 years of modification and planning we have finally come full circle with our farming system. The four principals that were developed from industry Research and Development namely "Sugar Yield Decline Joint Venture" are. Controlled Traffic, Minimum Tillage, Trash Retention,and Legume fallow Break Crops.We have now had a full crop cycle plant and four ratoons from this paddock, we were not able to get legumes planted, but we have sprayed the crop out done one pass with a coulter ripper (zonal tillage) and have successfully planted cane back into the permanent bed. I will add photo's of the crop when it emerges, it is hard to show in photo's but the state of the soil compared to when we first started this system only 5 years ago is staggering, I did not think that we would see such an improvement in soil structure. There is a clay strip that runs through the farm and in the past we could not get a fine enough tilth to get soil coverage when planting, now it is hard to find the clay at all. What is very gratifying is that we now have everything adapted to work with theses four principals, in my mind most of the hard work is done we now will be able to "fine tune"our management, and mother nature will do the rest.

Ready to plant Cane.

Just about ready to plant Cane, we have decided to do some zonal tillage before we plant, mainly to break up any radial compaction on the edges of the permanent bed. As usual we have modified another old implement to do what we needed, it has two Coulters placed at 800mm centers with two Yeoman tynes running about 300mm in the ground. If you look at the picture you can see how it is shattering the side of the bed which is pretty much what we need to do. It is amazing how good the soil is, even though we did not have a legume planted, the structure and moisture is fantastic. Finally got on the paddock to cut billets for planting , even now the ground is still soft, but we need to get planted it won't be long until it starts getting cool. We will plant into the paddock tomorrow so I will have some more photo's of that all going well.

Back In the Workshop.

It is that time of year , maintenance time, it is not to bad this year no need for open heart surgery as last year( pulling the whole roller train out). This time we only have to replace the extractor hoods, not to much of a hassle.We had a visit the other day from some researchers from a wide range of fields, carbon life cycle analysis of a sugarcane crop, a precision Ag guy who is looking at about 23 different light spectrum's for NIR ,and associate Proffesor in microbiology, an Ag engineer. It was an interesting afternoon listening to their thoughts and ideas about how we go about farming. A few days after that Dr Alan Garside who was the leader of the research team that developed the principals of the farming system that we use, it is always great to catch up with Alan and listen to his views on how we are going with the implementation of the principals of a new farming system. It was encouraging to hear him speak about the improvements in our soil health that he observed since his last visit, we also spoke about the experiences that I had overseas on my Nuffield travels and how the principals of a good farming system are the same world wide.I have a picture of my brother speaking with one of our visitors explaining our permanent bed minimum till operation.

Blair Farms Kendrick Idaho.

I have been home for a couple of weeks now and have just gotten around to update my travels, the reason it has taken me a while to get hear is that I have been writing my Nuffield Report, I am getting through it I have a lot of information and ideas so fingers crossed it will all make sense. my last stop on my travels was with Robert Blair an Eisenhower Fellow who I met when we were in the U.K last year,he was awarded 2009 international precision farmer of the year, and is a pioneer in U.A.V (unmanned aerial vehicles) for there use in remote sensing for agricultural applications. Robert farms 1400 acres , and grows winter wheat, lentils ,chickpeas, spring wheat,field peas and lucerne, as well having a few head of cattle.He also minimum tills and farms in one of the most unique places in the world the "pa loose" which is a series of undulating hills and canyons, when he jokes about faring three sides of an acre it is easy to see why .His combine is fitted with what is locally called a "hillside" front modification that basically allows the header front and the front axle of the combine to stay parallel to the ground but allows the body of the machine to tilt to remain horizontal, pretty cool to see.the beauty of the way Robert farms is that he constantly rotating crops on his fields, it is amazing to me to see farms on what I would consider hills here at home, some of his soils are up to a meter deep. A truly amazing landscape.