With a third of their farm being red loam and two-thirds Eradu sandplain, soil compaction
is an issue Rod and Andrew Messina of Spring Park Farms at Mullewa have had to manage carefully.
The brothers have implemented a controlled traffic system to minimise compaction,
the success of which is due in part to a long-standing focus on managing the top 300mm of the soil profile.
The Messina’s have spent years deep ripping to reduce soil compaction, and have more recently
introduced mouldboard ploughing to get on top of weeds, water repellence and incorporate lime.
They have now evolved to a controlled traffic system based on trams of thirty-six point four meters.
We picked that because that’s basically the width of our boomspray and our spreader
bar because that’s what goes over the paddock the most, so we have then built everything
in multiples, so long as it’s a multiple of 36.4.
When we come into start a paddock irrespective of what machine it is we come to start on
the controlled traffic line and work from there.
And then from that controlled traffic line back to the fence line or the boundary if
you like we will just fill in.
So depending on if it is a boomspray or a spreader bar then that matches perfectly,
if it’s a header or a seeder then sometimes we have got a 6m gap or sometimes we have
a nine meter gap and we just overlap that.
An extensive deep-ripping program to reduce deep soil compaction to a depth of 300mm was
key to establishing their CTF system.
With compaction reduced, the brothers then turned their focus to mouldboard ploughing
their sandplain soils to address weeds and water repellency.
The true controlled traffic farmer has to let go of the rules for a year and our theory
or our practice is we are trying to plough every square inch of the paddock as much as
we can just mainly to reduce weeds and stuff like that.
So we are ploughing and inverting our tramlines/controlled traffic lines.
We are just making sure when we come back to seed it that year and from then on we are
basically back in the same place we were.
Um and we have actually found is because you have inverted the soil and you have got more
clay content now on the surface those controlled traffic lines are getting harder and firmer
and actually acting more like a road a lot quicker than what they were previously,
just because the clay and the soil is really packing down.
So I guess that’s how we’ve adopted it, I don’t think there’s any way you could
go ploughing and keep the purest control traffic lines there, you’ve just got to hope that
once you’ve done it, and you only do it once or, well we don’t know how often, you’ll
go back to adopting your control traffic lines as soon as you can after that.
With the mouldboard plough inverting the soil profile, overcoming sinkage in the tramlines
has been a challenge for the Messina’s.
However, use of a hoe drill with wide tires behind the mouldboard has helped significantly.
That’s taking a lot of compression out of that first 100mm so we are getting a lot of
consolidation there and we find if we leave that for 3 to 4 weeks during the winter that
actually firms up quite firm then we come back into post spray or post spread we are
not getting those big deep ruts in the paddocks.
Three to four years following mouldboarding, the Messina’s have had to address compaction
again, but this time deeper in the profile.
They are now deep ripping again to reduce compaction, but this time down to 500-600mm.
We’ve dealt with the top stuff now, we’ve inverted the soil, we have put lime on,
now we’ve just got to break that next compaction layer.
What we are finding is below that it is actually quite soft.
So that is our next sort of task here I suppose three or four years and once we come back
into a lupin rotation on that mouldboarded country we will try and follow that up with
a deep rip, basically deep as we can go.
That’s the theory behind it.
So with plenty of lessons learnt as they have implemented their CTF system in conjunction
with deep ripping and mouldboard ploughing, what is the key to the success at Spring Park Farms?
I think you have just got to think about where you want to be and as you turn machines over
think about the big picture down the track, because no one can do it all at once.
Look I think it’s not for everyone and probably on red country and things like that it’s
probably less of an issue although I still believe what we are finding is once we have
made those roads in our paddocks, you can save fuel.
We we just talking even yesterday, as soon as the sprayer wanders off a control line,
the fuel use goes up, the sprayer sinks and things like that, so there’s no doubt there’s
definitely fuel savings and stuff like that there.