This farm was quite renowned in the ‘80s and ‘90s for blowing
and we've sort of got up to a metre and a half
of topsoil essentially that's blowing off the farm
and we never ever want to see things like that happen again.
"Music guitar strumming"
My name's Jodi Duncan, i'm a mix crop and livestock farmer.
We farm in the Fitzgerald/West River area
which is located to the west of Ravensthorpe.
I farm with my brother and sister-in-law
and their family.
We are about 70 percent cropping/30 percent sheep
and our total farm size is about 8 000 hectares.
We bought this farm 10 years ago,
it was obviously part of a plan to gradually expand our farming land area.
This property is further west and south
than our other main farms, so we're obviously
chasing a little bit of rainfall. It is about 1500 hectares total
of that about 1100 hectares is arable.
The property is generally well drained
and is a low frost risk type property,
it also had a good house on it which we were chasing at the time.
The Susetta River runs through this Property, it is one of the main
tributaries of the Fitzgerald River so the Susetta meets the Fitzgerald River
in the middle of the Fitzgerald River National Park.
It is known that the Susetta River was naturally saline tending to hyper-saline.
So this property would have originally had
saline areas on it in its natural state, obviously since it was cleared in the
‘60s and ‘70s those saline areas have increased and I believe the previous owners
first noticed salinity starting to appear
in the early ‘90s, so probably after the wet year in ‘92
they started seeing evidence
of salinity developing after that.
We have definitely seen saline areas increase
in the time we've owned the property, particularly after we had a run of wet years,
sort of between 2013 and 2016
and then we also had some flooding rains in 2017.
So yes, six years roughly of high rainfall and since then salinity
areas have definitely increased, popping up in areas we didn't,
wouldn't have expected to find salinity, on hillsides and in the middle of paddocks
as well as spreading out from the creek lines.
So i'm part of the Ravensthorpe
Agricultural Initiative Network (RAIN) the grower group based out of Ravensthorpe
and one of the common things that comes up at our meetings,
and has been brought up for probably the last three years since that run of wet years,
is that salinity is increasing,
it's popping up all over everyone's farm and getting worse.
Definitely not a problem that's going away.
So our main philosophy in farming is just trying to keep ground cover,
preventing any wind erosion. You can seebehind me here
this farm was quite renowned in the ‘80s and ‘90s for blowing.
That's quite a sandy soil type and we've sort of got up to a metre and a half
of topsoil essentially that's blowing off the farm,
buried the original boundary fence, we never ever want to see
things like that happen again. So we just want permanent ground cover
trying to make our farming system so that we don't see that again.
So when we bought the property there was obviously evidence of salinity
particularly in the creek lines that we knew were probably naturally saline.
The previous owners had also done a lot of
revegetation in the saline areas and planting salt bush.
They planted wavy leaf saltbush
and old man salt bush and probably some
river salt bush although there's not much evidence of that now.
We have since gone back in and planted quite large areas of Eyres Green oldman salt bush.
The perennials that were on the property include
tall wheat grass possibly puccinellia and rhodes grass,
the tall wheatgrass and rhodes grass are still evident today.
So considering that the original salt land pasture trial area was planted
in the early 2000s the fact that there's still
salt bush there and perennial grasses there 17 years later
is a testament to how persistent those varieties are.
So in the salt bush areas where the soil isn't
too saline we've got naturalised pasture species coming back in so
there's cape weed, rye grass, there's some clover and serradella in there
it provides a good understory to the salt bush.
Along with the perennial grasses
and the sheep really love it.
Sheep are a big part of our business we are 30 percent sheep
and we intend to stay that way for a long time. We believe they've got
benefits to the cropping system and perennials allow us to run sheep
over the summer and in the early autumn without putting
the cropping paddocks at risk, preventing wind erosion on those
cropping paddocks and stopping them baring out too much.
We can also use salt bush areas for confinement feeding, again to take the
pressure off cropping paddocks that are going into pasture.
And we can make sure those pasture paddocks get away
before the ewes start lambing and then when they start lambing
they're on good feed.
One of the best ways we find to use salt bush and perennials is to graze them in
conjunction with crop stubbles over the summer, so we try and make sure
that the crop stubbles are opened up to a salt bush area.
We find it just provides a complete diet
and the sheep do really well on it.
So this is a little four or five hectare corner of a paddock that we've fenced off
and planted with Eyres Green oldman salt bush.
We graze it in conjunction with a stubble paddock. So once the crops harvested we let sheep
into the stubble in
sort of December and it's grazed right through till the end of February/March,
so the sheep graze the stubble and the salt bush at the same time.
At the end of February these Eyres Green oldman saltbush were all bare sticks,
the sheep had grazed them right back there was no leaf matter at all.
But in this time since the sheep have
been taken out, so the last three or four months
they've come back with all fresh new growth and they look fantastic.
And ready for the sheep to come back here once the crops are harvested again.
In purchasing this farm we've inherited a really good salt land
pasture site and perennial site. The previous owners did the numbers
when they established that site on the payback period for
salinity or revegetating saline areas with salt bush and perennials.
The calculations then were about
350 dollars per hectare establishment costs so that's back in 2003,
that doesn't include fencing.
And at that time the calculation was
that they would get a 1000 grazing days per hectare per year
for the site which will pay off the investment in about two years.
So across all our properties we try and do a little bit of re-veg every year
with mostly native tree species and shrub species.
Each year we sort of do between, sort of two and ten hectares.
On this property we've tried direct seeding
and seedlings of native species,
unfortunately we've had a couple of dry years
and it hasn't necessarily been successful
but it's an area that is highly susceptible to wind erosion,
the sheep just camp on it and it wasn't really a productive area for us.
So we've fenced that area off and are looking to re-vegetate it
to provide a good wind break, to provide shelter for sheep and
just to make that area look much more pleasing.
What we most like about farming is the fact that we get to work together as a family
and we're producing food for the world.
We're producing crops that are exported all over the world.
We're producing wool and sheep meat, again that's exported
all over the world to feed and clothe people.