Last year I attended a BRIM(Brome RIM) workshop in Ouyen and from that workshop I've
learned a lot about rotations and how important they are with
phase farming and having a long-term approach to your farm and how to
control brome grass especially. It (Brome RIM) has got various ways you can utilise it.
Sometimes you can look back on where you've made mistakes and then how to
stay in a trouble-free environment out of brome grass. When brome grass wants to
take over, it can take over really quite severely in certain parts of your
paddock. The ability of brome grass then to adapt to germinate staggered over
your season - it becomes nutrition competition, moisture
competition. It gets to a point where actually quality of your grain can
be in jeopardy as well, so there's not only yield losses, there's quality
... it's endless. Disease levels - it goes on and on so when it
takes hold it can certainly kick your gross margins around fairly heavily.
Every year that you grow a crop you need to have a strategy to get through that
season which helps the following season which helps it. Every year
you're putting something in place that will knock down your brome grass
seed bank. We had low numbers and by using this tool and talking to people
about it, it's no surprise that it's crept back in. Just by cereal phases, not
followed up by proper legume controls, not enough legumes or not enough
brome grass control. One year on low numbers is just not enough to keep low
numbers low which is what we're aiming for. Use of chemicals is quite high in
legume crops. There's these two grass sprays and a desiccation so when we do
go into a phase we we are after one hundred percent control. One hundred
per cent is not achievable, but we are aiming for 100% wherever possible and then
following up somehow with a Clearfield or with a - some people might be
into hay, we're not, but strategic use of how the following crops go - there's a lot
of residual problems out there at the moment so it is a real battle to be able
to attack brome grass every year. The use of windrow burning has been used
quite extensively in the past we've gone to chaff decks this year and we still
have a bit to go with trying to get them to work
as a grass controlling method. Chaff decks are capturing all material
that goes over the sieves, so it's laid on our 15 metre tram tracks. We're
still learning to know how to handle those. We are hoping that
our chaff decks can replace our windrow burning - not to say that if we do get in
a situation that we do have to go back to it - but in our immediate future
we are trying to replace windrow burning with chaff decks and hopefully some of
our erosion problems can be also subsided by using them as well.