Hoping on rain to save mungbean crop

Mr Noffke farms 1450 hectares of cultivation at Keronga, and the grains operation has done well with winter cropping this year, with 1000ha of chickpeas harvesting to almost 3000 tonnes. 

But while the winter crop was a success – it is the summer mungbeans which are suffering from hot days and heavy mirid pressure. 

“It’s been so hot and so dry that we had sort of walked away from the crop, but we just had about 40mm (of rain) last weekend, so we will spray for mirids now, and we will do a heliothis spray in a fortnight or so, and we will see how it goes,” Mr Noffke said. 

“If everything had gone properly we should have been harvesting now.

“We definitely probably need two more rainfalls.”

He said unlike a lot of farms in the region, he did only one fungicide spray on the winter chickpeas, and three insecticide sprays. 

“We did very well with the chickpeas, and they sold fairly well,” he said. 

“But in saying that, there are some growers who didn’t do well out of their chickpeas at all.

“I guess we were the furthest southern crop that did well - it’s just amazing that we did one fungicide spray and didn’t have any issues.”

Mr Noffke, said he had doubts over whether farmers who did more than one fungicide spray were “achieving anything”.

“There’s was a lot of money dropping out of aeroplanes for not a lot of benefit,” he said. 

Majority of Mr Noffke’s chickpea was planted dry, after an original plan to plant in April was delayed by three weeks.

“In those three weeks, the moisture had already gone down eight or nine inches,” Mr Noffke said.

“Some of the seed went into moisture, and some didn’t.

“Three weeks later it rained 30mm… and then we got another 30mm a week later, but some of the deep stuff had died. 

“So planting deep, and half dry, wasn’t actually that successful… but in the end, it yielded well.”

Mr Noffke also runs a large commercial Droughtmaster herd on his other property, Inderi, with 1000 breeders and a 1000 head feedlot.