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.