I'm Bruce McLean, farmer at Bool Lagoon roughly farming around 2,500 hectares on my own cropping
and share farm basis, plus probably another 1,200 hectares of contract work.
Cropping rotations mainly consists of wheat, barley, canola, beans and small seed, pasture
seed production.
Well, I've been interested in the long-season canola for a little while.
It's sort of interested me in the fact of gaining that extra yield through longer season
varieties.
I always thought the spring varieties may be just a bit too short for this high rainfall
environment where we normally receive sort of about 500mm/550mm annually a year during
the wintertime, which is probably maybe hampering our yield ability a little bit.
And this one, the 971 Clearfield variety suited just on the basis that it had the herbicide
tolerance in case there was any issues with weeds later on.
The original thought was maybe it was going to be a rape crop anyway, so that the share
farmer could actually graze the field over the summer.
I brought the issue to the table of maybe trying out this long-season canola where we'd
grow the canola and then didn't have to worry about the issues after rape of having to re-sow
another crop next winter.
This thing was sown on the 24th of December 2013.
Silage was done in October, but there were still areas of water-logging on the field
due to high water table and the long spring last year.
And then we got into harvest and it wasn't until we'd had a wet weather break in the
harvest that I was able to get out here and sow the crop.
And then we had another rainfall event the first week of January of nearly an inch of
rain which helped it along, and it's only had a couple of light irrigations sort of
in that late-January/February period and then they were grazing it from February until about,
on and off, 'til the middle of June.
We had sheep on here for starters but the canola just kept growing away on them, so
we then chose to put some heifers in.
On 36 hectares there was over 700 lambs in here plus nearly 200 heifers at the one time
and it was still nearly getting away on them.
So performance was fantastic.
We had feed tests done on the canola and it stood up real well, came out at a bit over
17% protein and just a bit over 13% ME, which is quite staggering too really.
And by all reports yeah, all animals did quite well on it for that period of time, which
filled quite a feed gap during that summer period.
Yeah, we locked it up for grain around the middle of June and then I did do a winter
spray for grasses and broad-leafs after that.
Seeding time I sowed it with a blend of 100kg a hectare of a MAP mix and incorporated some
Treflan and Chlorpyrifos for army worm and everything earlier on.
And during the summer had no insect treatments to apply, nothing seemed to worry it which
was interesting 'cos I thought it might have been in for a fair issue there 'cos diamondback
moth are an issue here, but it didn't seem to worry it at all.
Then I also gave it a feed of some stimulus urea/sulphate of ammonia blend at the end
of June and I'm probably likely to give it another hit of urea, another 100kg urea on
the end of August.
Well, I'm hoping I will average around the area, you like to see sort of two-and-a-half
ton of hectare of canola; I'm hoping we'll see over three with this to be sort of worthwhile
in the scheme of it all.
Oh, we'll definitely be giving this long-season canola more of a go in the future, whether
it's sowing earlier under irrigation.
It's an unknown to how early we can sow it without getting caught with the cool weather
'cos we have been known to have frosts nearly down to November, which whether that would
impact the vernalisation period of these longer season canolas.
But be nice to think we may be sowing in early-October, somewhere around there maybe with a chance
of then being able to graze crops through from December onwards, which'd be quite a
big feed gap.
There won't be any struggle finding stock or mouths to put on it if something gets out
of control.
There's still a lot unknown I suppose of how it will handle a dry summer, 'cos last year
we were fortunate that we did have good subsoil moisture and quite a late spring.
Still, when we had that dry period through late-January and February was quite dry, it
still handled very, very well.
So no, it's quite a performer and yeah, we look forward to seeing what further we can
do with it in the future I think.