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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.
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.
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.
We’ve just started seeding for another season. The first crop in the ground is a little black round seed not much bigger than the ball point in your pen. It’s grown because it’s an oilseed. It’s crushed & the oil used to make cooking oil, margarine, biofuels etc.
We try to plant Canola at a density of around 3kg/ Hectare (10,000 square meters). We plant using a (cultivator) ‘bar’ that is 13.5m wide at around 10 km/h. This means we can cover around 13 hectares per hour. According to the seed label, there are 192,700 Canola seeds per kilogram of seed. This means that in the past hour I planted around 7.515 million seeds. In a few weeks the paddock I’m currently in hopefully have nearly 40,500,000 canola plants. Over two 10 hour days I could plant over 150 million seeds.
The seeder is driven by a tractor that is being guided by 15 satellites in perfectly straight lines while burning only around 3L of Diesel per ha or 45L per hour. The amount of seed output from the machine varies with the speed being travelled, so the plants are spread evenly across the paddock.
There are big numbers in farming.
One of my wifes friends asked me the other day, ‘So is it the quiet time of the year on the farm at the moment?’ My response was: ‘In theory yes, but we’re still finding heaps to do.’
Which is true, I’m not sure exactly why but we seem as busy as ever at the moment. If you’re interested, this is a rough list of things we’ve been doing over the last week or so.
Outloading grain – We’ve started trucking out the Durum wheat we’re storing. It’s heading to the pasta makers San Remo in Adelaide.
Snail Baiting – Favourable conditions for summer weeds mean favourable conditions for snails.
Cross working paddocks – Not something we normally do, but we need to flatten out paddocks after leaving tracks in the soil during harvest. So we’ve had to work some of the soil over to fill in the holes. (See Pic Below)
Picking up sticks – As boring as it sounds. Cleaner paddocks make planting easier, so this needs to be done occasionally!
Preparing for seeding – We typically start seeding paddocks around the end of April, so we’ve been doing maintenance on our ‘bar’.
This is our seeding cultivator 'bar'
I received some pretty funny responses to this photo & caption that I posted to twitter the other day. I thought you might like them to.
My kudos and respect to the first person to correctly identify what this does.
I received these responses on twitter:
When covering 1.8m at 2.5km/h, it takes a while to get the work done.
On Facebook a cousin of mine posted:
Clearly it’s some sort of giant Japanese hook for catching whales. What it’s doing in at your place is the real mystery.
quantonglanes had the correct answer. The machine is basically a giant vacuum cleaner, which sucks clover seed pods off the ground and then separates the seed from the dirt/pod material. Here’s what they look like in action. That is if you could refer to motion at the speed of 2.5 kph as ‘action.’
It takes a while to get things done covering only 1.8m at 2.5km/hHere is the wheat crop that we followed all through 2010. A brilliant crop ready to harvest. I quickly climbed the silo and snapped these photos back on the 7th of December as the first major rain of harvest was on the way. The photos aren’t great quality because I only had my phone, but they still convey the challenges that this summer has brought.
Fortunately this particular wheat crop seemed to survive the big rain. We harvested over 5T/ Hectare of Durum (pasta) wheat from it and it didn’t seem to be too weather damaged. Some of our other crops weren’t so lucky, being downgraded in quality. However, great yields and good prices have made the summer rain less of a disaster than it may have been.
It’s a gloriously sunny day today, the kind that gives you hope that maybe winter is coming to an end. We’ve even been lucky to string enough of these sunny days together* to get onto our paddocks and do some work. So I’m out on the tractor today spreading fertiliser on one of our wheat crops.
This is the view looking forward in the tractor:
You can see that I’m driving down previously existing tracks in the paddock. This allows us to minimise crop damage & is where our GPS auto-steer really pays for itself. Without it we’d probably have to get a plane in to spread the fertiliser. The fertiliser I’m spreading here is known as ‘Urea’. It’s a solid form of nitrogen, which dissolves into the ground when rained upon. It looks like the polystyrene balls that you fill beanbags with. But it is of course much heavier.
The view from behind shows the 2 ‘whale tail’ spreaders that we use to do the spreading:
It works via 2 big fans on the air-seeder blowing the fertiliser out the spouts. We aim to cover 30m (98.5 ft) with each pass, but if it’s windy we struggle.
The end result is fertiliser spread over the whole paddock, where it will soak into the soil to be absorbed by the wheat plants and used to increase both the yield and quality of harvested wheat.
*It rained this afternoon.
I wouldn’t say it went viral, but my post from last Thursday on ‘Tweeting with Tony Burke’ was extremely well received. I had lots of positive comments about it on twitter, and it was re-tweeted by several people, many with little interest in farming. It was easily the most viewed blog post I’ve ever had & was great to get positive comments and commenters.
This months ‘View From the Silo’ will be a few days late due to poor weather. For 2 reasons:
So while I wait for the weather to clear, I give you this YouTube video that appeared in my twitter feed a few days ago. It’s thought provoking and illustrates some of the reasons that I decided to try a career in agriculture over a career in the corporate world. Despite my earlier post about the shrinking of rural Australia, I honestly think that the future of farming can be nothing but bright. The reality is the world will struggle to feed it’s growing population, and that can only be positive for agriculture and rural areas in general. The other passion of mine that this clip talks about is technology. In order to feed an increasingly resource scarce and populous world it will have to use all the technology it can get it’s hands on.
Check it out and tell me what you think.
This is part 3 of my series – ‘View from the Silo’ showing the dramatic changes our area undergoes throughout a cropping season. The first 2 in the series are: April & June.
A big change from April
Well it’s the end of July and we’re thankfully over halfway through winter. You can see that our wheat crop has started growing and now has almost complete ground cover. Welcome rain has meant that the crops in our area are looking quite good at this early stage. The tire marks you can see running up and down the paddock show that this wheat was sprayed last week in order to kill weeds and the ‘self-sown’ lentils and clover from last year. You can see the complete contrast in colour compared to the April photo just 3 short months ago. Dead, dry and barren then, lush green and growing now. It’s a very welcome change!
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