Building a Mixed Farming System That Spreads Risk

Hi, I’m Tim Ford. Welcome to the Hay Matters podcast, where the Feed Central and LocalAg team unpack the very best of what’s happening in Australia’s fodder industry, from planting through to baling, testing, and feeding. We cover the characters and the information that matters most to everyone in the supply chain.

Steve Page

Hi, it’s Steve Page here again from Feed Central, doing another podcast. And this morning I’m out visiting Anthony Exton in the Coolamon region. Anthony, good morning, and lovely to catch up with you again. I’ve been out here for a number of years, catching up and seeing what you do here. Can you just fill us in a little bit on your property, what you do, what you grow, and what your main products are?

Anthony Exton

So we’re mixed farming. We farm about 6500 acres. We have our canola, wheat, and barley rotations. We also have our hay crops and a few cattle, so we do a lot of straw into Sydney as well. We’re baling a lot of produce every year, and yeah, marketing the hay and all that sort of thing is, yeah…

Steve

You send your straw into Sydney, is that for the mushroom people,

Anthony

Yeah, that’s mushrooms. We’ve done that for now 15 years, yeah.

Steve

And that works well for you, yeah. It does.

Anthony

Every little bit counts with farming, so every, every little bit of income you can get helps.

Steve

And can you tell us roughly what your breakup is between grain, the hay side of things, and your livestock? What proportion of the business is each one?

Well, we used to run our rotation in thirds, so we’d have a third to pulses, a third to wheat, and a third to barley. With the price of fertiliser and stuff like that, we’ve cut our canola portion back and we’ve gone to a pea crop and that sort of stuff.

Anthony

Well,we used to run our rotation in thirds, so we’d have a third to pulses, a third to wheat, and a third to barley. With the price of fertiliser and stuff like that. We’ve cut our canola portion back, and we’ve gone to a pea crop, and that sort of stuff.

Probably our hay side of things wouldn’t be a quarter; it’d be an eighth. We’d probably have an eighth in hay, and that’s just rotational. We take out part of the pulse area and put in a hay crop because we use vetch and those sorts of things, and it’s used as a break crop as well.

Steve

We were talking there earlier on, you don’t do a pure vetch, you do a vetch oats or vetch cereal  combination, and can you talk about that a little bit more.

Anthony

Yep, so I’ve seen pure vetch crops and they fall over on the ground, and you have trouble curing. So I sow about 10 kilos of oats with about 30 kilos of vetch, and the oats just help hold the vetch up. Then, when you come to cutting the hay, it provides a bit more elevation and holds the vetch so the air can get through to help with the curing. A lot of our curing time with the Massey mower-conditioner is four to five days, and it’s ready to bale.

Steve

And what row spacings are you doing that on?

Anthony

So we’re at nine-inch spacing.

Steve

And what type of planter have you got? Is it a tine or is it a disc?

Yeah, it’s just an old Flexi-Coil with tines and press wheels.

And that’s been working well for you?

Anthony

Yeah, keep it simple. I’ve tried different ways and different things, and in our, we’ve got a little bit of stony country, and we keep it simple. There’s less maintenance, and it just works.

Steve

And do you, once you’ve planted your hay crops, do you then roll it to help with that stone issue, or what do you do there?

Anthony

Generally no, but we have rock pickers, and the country is very clean because we’re doing straw and everything, so we always pick everything up. And it’s always about paddock selection. I won’t put a hay crop on a hilly paddock that we know is stony. Generally, they’re kept to the flatter paddocks.

Steve

And we were talking earlier about planting a crop but having options available later, either taking it to grain or hay, depending on the season. Can you explain a little bit more about that for us too?

Anthony

Well, it’s supply and demand, isn’t it? So I always try to finish a season with my hay sheds full, and then the rest will go to grain. So if it’s a dry year and we know we can sell the hay, we’ll make sure all our sheds are full, and we may even do a little bit extra if it’s that way. But if grain prices are good, well, we have that alternative to put the header in the paddock and take the grain instead. So it just gives you that bit more of an option.

Steve

spread your risks a bit more,

Anthony

try to,

Steve

And you’ve had a, you know, I’ve come through some very dry area in that northern New South Wales, coming down here, but you fellas here seem to have had a good start. Can you tell us where you are up to, and how much you got planted so far, and where you’re going from here,

Anthony

So we were lucky in February. We got 100–120 mil of rain, and that sort of set our profile up because we were quite dry before that. Then it’s been dry since, but we’ve been lucky in the last few days to receive 20 mil. Currently I’ve got my canola in the ground — 300 hectares of that — and we’re currently sowing our hay crops, being vetch and oats. Then we’ve got an oats-clover blend we’re going to do, and then we’ll go on to our straight oats and move on into our wheats and barleys after that.

Yeah, at the moment things are set up pretty well if we can keep getting the follow-up rains.

Steve

So you’ve got what, a few weeks ahead of you?

Anthony

Oh, easy.

Yeah, no, we’ve got the two seeders, so we can get across it pretty quickly. But yeah, it all takes time. By the time you get it done, yeah… And at the end of the day, it is only early May, so last year we didn’t plant our hay crop till the second week of June. So we’re a good month in front of last year.

Steve

So you’re not concerned too much with frost in the late season.

Anthony

Well, a neighbour told me here that you really can’t plant for a frost. You try — you push your wheat crops back a bit to try and get out of that zone at the end of the season — but generally the frost that does the damage is the one that’s out of the book. It’s not the group of frosts; it’s normally that one one-off that’ll do the damage at flowering.

Steve

Yep. No, totally agree with that. We, yeah, exactly the same up in Northern New South Wales, that our agronomists used to always say that if you around that 10% damage on a frost is where you should be, really, because your yield will make up for it all, or the planting dates will make up for that 10%

Anthony

That’s right. Yeah,

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Steve

so let’s go back to last season. How did that go for you with your hay production?

Anthony

Very well, we were again lucky, things were looking really tight through the winter, and then we received, I think it was a good 50 mil of rain, would have been August, and it took a crop that was six or eight inches high up to a metre high, and the oats and vetch took off, and our yields were really good,

Steve

and you got some really lovely quality too, if I remember right.

Anthony

Yeah, yeah, again, the gods shined on us, we were able to cut it and get it into a bale, no rain or anything, yeah, and short curing time, like they were good, good drying days. It was quite windy, which helped, but yeah.

Steve

And going on to your marketing side, How do you, how do you do your marketing? You, you’d have some regular customers that you look after every year, and and then the rest of it, how do you do that? So

Anthony

We have our local ones, mostly people who buy our straw and our hay. We also sell through LocalAg and Feed Central. Matt gets us out away from our local area. It’s a good platform to get your product out there.

Steve

So you do a bit through LocalAg and Local Ag Plus. Can you tell us what your advantages are on either one?

Anthony

So this is my first year of using Local Ag. I’ve liked it because of the customer interaction. You can talk to the person who’s buying the hay a bit more. We have our own trucks, so we do our own freight, so it’s good because we get that whole process of paddock to person — finish the job, sort of thing. So we get that really personal side of it, and that’s part of what you do it for, to know that you’ve helped someone out with the hay. It also gets us into a lot of different areas as well, like the New England. We wouldn’t normally go into the New England, so you sort of get up there and meet new people.

Steve

and yeah, but you still had that surety of getting paid,

Anthony

So that’s exactly it. That’s the big thing. You know the money’s there before you take it. That’s the most important part of hay work — getting paid.

Steve

Yeah. You miss that one load if you don’t get paid, even for one load, it’s a big hit.

Anthony

That’s right, exactly. Yeah, well, the cost of producing it now — it costs a lot to put it into a bale — so you need to have that surety there.

And so, just going back to some of the equipment — you do your own trucks, you do your own carting, and that makes it work really well for you on LocalAg. Can you also just tell us what size baler you’ve got? You’re running an 8x4x3 baler.

Anthony

Yep, so we start with the mower. We’ve got the Massey Ferguson Razor Bar, so it’s got the double crimp — two sets of rollers — so we get a really good crimp there. Then we’ve just purchased an Elho roller-bar rake, and it’s a big, heavy, robust rake, so we can gather that and bring the two rows together into one nice, uniform row. We don’t end up with any lumps or anything in it. Actually, last season the rows were that big I had to tow a canola roller to actually push the row down.

So then the balers — we’ve got two balers. We run a Case HD, and we’ve got the old Massey 2270 XD. I’ve always had the Masseys.

Steve

So you moved away from the Massey to the Case, this for the new one. Any reason

Anthony

With HD straw, we require density, and the HD gives a bit of that. The Massey is very simple and easy to maintain. Yeah, the Case is a very good baler.

Steve

What sort of weight are you getting in with those straws on the with the case,

Anthony

The Case will be a good 30 or 40 kilos per bale heavier. It’s a longer chamber, which helps a lot.

Steve

And what’s that getting up to the 550-500

Anthony

Our straw job into Sydney only requires it at 530, so we can get it to 530. The Massey will only get it to sort of 480 or 490 on a good night.

Yeah, but with our hay job, it helps because we can get the density right, get the weights right, and you get a bigger window in your baling. You can start a bit earlier and finish a bit later, just from the longer chamber and the better density.

Steve

so just looking at the local issues we’re facing at the moment with the with all these things going on with fuel prices and everything like that, and fertiliser prices. Have you changed anything in your rotation this year to to work in with that a bit more to ease the pain?

Anthony

No, I haven’t. I’m a bit of a stickler for having a rotation and sticking with it, because what aspects are affecting you at the start of the season won’t always affect you at the end. You just don’t know where the year is going to take you. And if I go and change things this year, will it muddle up next year? So if I stick to the same thing year in, year out, it should work itself out over a 10-year period.

Steve

Yeah, you’ve spread your risks enough with everything else that you, yeah, you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket there,

Anthony

Exactly. Yes, yeah, that’s why we have the straw and the trucks. It’s a lot of stuff to keep going, but it averages itself out very well.

Steve

All right. Thank you, Anthony. Lovely to catch up with you again, and all the best for this season.

Anthony

Thank you, Stephen. Thank you, LocalAg.

Tim

Tim Ford here again, and thanks to Steve for another great podcast. Don’t forget, you can follow the show in your podcast app, or leave us a rating and review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and share this episode with a friend.

This podcast is hosted by Steve Page, presented by Feed Central, and sponsored by LocalAg Marketplace. The producer is Cara Stewart. The audio editor is Ellen Ronalds Keen. The music is by Pianino.