Yarrow's corn kingdom

Mr Yarrow said his strategy was to make the most of the breaks in the weather and grow a variety of crops in winter, as well as early and late summer.

If this season's corn crop is anything to go by, the plan is working.

Mr Yarrow and his family farm 900 hectares at Swainston, Norwin.

When water allows, they have the ability to flood furrow irrigate the whole farm.

They have a bore-water allocation of 630 megalitres per year and three ring tanks, enabling them to pick up overland run-off when there is heavy storm rain on their property.

The Yarrows planted 60ha of Pioneer P1756 on 1-metre row spacings at a rate of 50,000 seeds/ha in the final week of September 2014.

The corn was sown into a field that had previously grown chickpeas and had been fallowed for 12 months.

Prior to planting, they had to pre-irrigate to get enough moisture in the soil to establish the crop.

Phosphorus was applied before planting at a rate of 25kg/ha, and 125kg/ha of nitrogen was applied, half prior to planting and the remainder side-dressed after planting.

Mr Yarrow said the pre-irrigation took up a lot of their water allocation - 1.75ML/ha - and a further two in-crop irrigations had been applied, using up 2ML/ha.

He said the crop, which he hoped to harvest in early March, was destined for the snack-food market for products such as corn chips.

"It's got a beautiful colour about it; it's tall and I'm pleased with the uniform plant spacing and the cobs look very long," Mr Yarrow said.

"It's standing up perfectly, even though we have had some windy days."

To flesh out his summer crop rotation, Mr Yarrow sowed 620ha of sorghum across several plantings from November 1 to December 24.

Pioneer G22 and Pioneer G33 sorghum was planted at a rate of 75,000 seeds/ha into a mixture of fallowed chickpea country and the previous season's summer crop country.

Mr Yarrow said it had taken eight weeks to plant.

The first two fields were planted into dry soil and had to be irrigated; they then planted on the promise of forecast rain, and in late December they were planting into moisture.

Mr Yarrow said they had used selective herbicides including Starane and atrazine to combat the weeds that had emerged from irrigating and the December rain.

"We have a little bit of irrigation water left over, which we intend to use to irrigate some of the sorghum that was planted into last year's summer crop ground.

"We will be able to irrigate some of it, but not all, because our water supply is limited."

Mr Yarrow said to summarise 2014 in a word it would be - dry. The previous season's summer crop had struggled because they did not receive summer rainfall.

They received a substantial fall in March but did not receive much again until mid-December, when they got 125 millimetres.

Shortly after Christmas, they received an additional 48mm, prompting Mr Yarrow to plant 55ha of Pioneer 32P55 corn last Monday.

This year Mr Yarrow hopes to do earthworks maintenance on his irrigation infrastructure, including cleaning drains, maintaining dam walls and field levelling.

He said he had also begun looking into overhead lateral irrigation infrastructure, but given the significant investment of money, he was approaching the idea with caution and it was not an immediate plan.