West Prairie's tough summer

A lack of planting rain forced Alex and his son Roger to slash their summer cropping program by 70 per cent while yields for the corn, cotton and sorghum that was planted look set to disappoint.

“It’s the worst I have seen it,” Alex said.

“We didn’t get the planting rain at the end of last year and we’ve only had 29mm in January and 1mm so far this month.”

Mr Gwynne farms 560ha on Tangalooma in the West Prairie region outside Jondaryan while his son Roger has another 480ha under cultivation nearby.

Roger has all but written off this summer and said his concern had now turned to the coming seasons.

“We plant a bit of winter crop but basically our summer crops are our biggest earners,” he said.

“We are going to need a very big, wet winter to build enough moisture to plant our next summer crop.

“We have country here that hasn’t been touched since the wheat and chickpeas were harvested and the cultivation has cracks in it that I could jam my foot down.

“It’s going to take a lot of rain to fill those profiles up enough for our next summing planting.”

The Gwynne’s farming operation is predominantly dryland although some summer crops receive a small amount of irrigation from a ring tank filled from overland flow.

Roger is currently preparing to harvest a 40ha corn crop that was planted in late October and received limited water from two small lateral irrigators over the summer.

“We pre-watered that paddock and planted the corn back at the end of October and I think the crop has had five light passes since then,” he said.

“It has suffered through the heat and the lack of water and I think we’ll be lucky to get 3t/ha off that. Normally we’d like to get three times that.”

Precious irrigation water was also used to give 45ha of cotton the best chance possible.

“The cotton was planted into country that was two year fallow and it had pretty good moisture so we planted it dry and then watered it to get it up and it’s had no water since so it is basically a dryland crop,” he said.

“It looks pretty ordinary – we might get 2.5 bales/ha if we are lucky.

“We only planted 120 acres this year and we would normally have planted 300 acres.”

Roger also has 122ha of Buster sorghum in the ground that he planted in first week of December.

The sorghum is due to be harvested in six weeks and Roger said it looked unlikely that rain would fall in time to help boost the yield.

“If we could get a big dose of rain on it now it would help a lot but I don’t think it’s going to come,” he said.

“We are pleased to see some western areas getting rain though. It might wet those areas up enough to push some moisture through to here.”