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What's unusual about this image?
Apart from the poor quality of the iPhone 3GS camera, can you spot anything out of the ordinary in this photo? It’s a pic of our neighbours sheep grazing across the road from my house.
Click on the image for a higher res version.
Had to take this photo and share it. We shift sheep a little differently on our farm. 
A few days ago a friend of mine sent me this. A song about buying tractors online seems to fit the general theme of this blog. Enjoy.
While windrowing our last paddock of canola for this season, I had a crack at making a video blog and this is what I came up with. In it I explain what windrowing is and why we do it. I also show a few of the customisations we’ve made to our own windrower. As I said, this is my first video blog so please be gentle.
It’s late pre-silly season at the farm at the moment. We’re all busy getting machinery & ourselves ready for windrowing, and then harvest. The theory is to do lots of maintenance and repairs now in a bid to avoid crucial downtime later. A bit like communism, it’s a good theory.
Some of the things happening over the past few days include:
Beating the odds.
This is the durum (pronounced deu-ram in Vic. du-rum in SA.) wheat that is growing next to my house. As you can see it is well out in head by now and looking great. The wheat harvested from here will most likely be sent to a wheat mill in Adelaide that turn it into pasta for the Australian domestic market. Buy a packet of San Remo pasta and there’s a chance that you’ll be eating our wheat. Buy one next year, and it could be what you see in this photo. This looks like being a good crop for us. But just how good remains to be seen.
I walked just a few meters into the edge of this crop and found this:
Instant pasta wheat. Just add water.
A crack in the ground wide enough for me to get more than half of my hand into. That means the soil is very dry and these plants either are, or soon will be quite thirsty. Right at the time when they’re trying to flower and produce as many seeds as possible. The weather over the next 2 weeks will be the difference between an ‘average’ yield and a ‘bumper’ yield.
Still, whatever happens it should end up being a remarkable result. I got bored the other day and started doing some statistical analysis on our local historical rainfall records. You can download the figures from your local area and perform similar mathematical exploits from the BOMs climate data site. What I found was both interesting and concerning. The graphs I made show a lot of different things, and I’ll try and explain some of them in the coming days and weeks.
The first one I’ll show you is the graph of our ‘growing season rainfall’. This is probably the most important and telling of the graphs I’ve made as it shows the rain that falls between the ‘growing’ months of April-October*. This is the rain that our crops can use to grow. Summer rainfall is often lost through evaporation & isn’t reliable in any case. It is most telling because it clearly shows what effect the much publicised 10 year drought across south-eastern Australia has had on our area. Our 10 year average is currently around 80mm below the overall average of 328mm. That’s a yearly reduction of 24% or almost a quarter of what used to be taken as normal. 80mm on any given year is the difference between drought and average. Average and bumper. Profit and loss. Another way to look at this: cumulatively over the last 10 years most of SE Australia has missed out on at least 2 years worth of production. How would your business survive such a hit?
This is what makes this current season look like a potentially remarkable one. We’re looking at average or above average yields on what is currently the 8th driest growing season on record. (We still have 2 weeks for this figure to improve.) This because the crops have been able to utilize all the moisture that soaked into the soil during last years wet summer. So the rain may have ruined last years harvest to an extent. But it looks like it’s going to save this current one.
*Our later season crops like chickpeas can make good use of November rainfall, but overall rain becomes less and less useful after the Melbourne Cup.
When I started this blog, I felt like I was the only one around blogging about rural life. If that was ever true, it certainly isn’t now. Here’s a list of people to contact if you ever want to learn something about rural life. I’ve pulled this list together from the contacts I have on twitter, and this fantastic list of Aussie farm blogs that Alison Fairleigh has put together. It’s by no means exhaustive, if you think I’ve missed someone feel free to add them in a comment!
Around 12 months ago I decided to purchase my first ever laptop. The one I settled on was the Asus K52F with the following key specifications:
It had a good CPU which was the main thing I was after. I have my Xbox 360 for gaming, so didn’t care about a graphics card. I had an OK laptop. But it wasn’t great. It didn’t have the 4Gb of RAM I was after and I wasn’t interested in paying big $$$ for a Core i7 processor. So I had every intention of upgrading my laptop from the moment I brought it. What I didn’t realise was how good I could make it via a simple hard drive upgrade. ‘
While the ultimate computer upgrade is always going to be to an SSD, again the expense and tiny capacity make SSDs restrictive, despite the awesomeness they offer. But through my favourite tech blog, I became aware of the Seagate Momentous XT. A mix of size and speed. Then after reading this quote a few months ago, I was sold:
Solid state hard drives are so freaking amazing performance wise, and the experience you will have with them is so transformative, that I don’t even care if they fail every 12 months on average! I can’t imagine using a computer without a SSD any more; it’d be like going back to dial-up internet or 13″ CRTs or single button mice. Over my dead body, man!
I wasn’t interested in playing Russian roulette with an SSD, so I thought I’d try the compromise hybrid hard drive. I lashed out and brought a 500Gb Seatgate Momentus XT and for good measure, another 4Gb of RAM. Best upgrade ever. Adding in the RAM improved performance modestly, but when I combined that with the Hybrid hard drive wonderful things happened. It has the speed & feel of a much more expensive laptop.
The only speed test I can offer you, is the boot-up times. Before the upgrade, it took my laptop a tardy 1:39 to power up and load windows and be ready to use. This is was the speed of a near new laptop. The boot-up time with the extra RAM & better hard drive is around 40 seconds. More than twice as fast, that’s a 60% improvement on the speed out of the box!
My laptop is now a much zappier:
For a couple of hundred dollars I’ve been able to vastly improve my laptop. As a result I’ll get a lot more use and years out of it. Next time your computer is feeling a bit slow & creaky if it’s less than 4-5 years old you can probably extend it’s life with some more RAM and/or a better hard drive.
Our crops may be in the ground and growing, but we’re still out-loading grain from harvest time. This particular bin was being used to store durum wheat which we gets trucked directly to the San Remo pasta mill in Adelaide. You’ve probably seen San Remo pasta for sale in your supermarket. If you buy some there’s a small chance it’s made from wheat we’ve grown.
Looking out from the inside
I thought this was a good photo, considering it’s an iPhone camera.
Following hot on the heels of Tuesdays article in ‘The Age’, the 7pm Project ran a story tonight on the dwindling supplies of Australian farmers. The characters were different, but the messages were essentially the same. That is, the average age of Australia’s farmers is 60 but 90% of Australia’s food is grown domestically, so who will be feeding us all in 20 years time.
If you’re interested, check it out. The farm related segment is towards the end of the clip.
It’s fantastic that this complex issue is being looked at and discussed. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
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