Hope for CQ sorghum harvest despite pest pressures

The Mifsud family run a 4400 hectare cropping enterprise, 40km north west of Clermont across two properties.

Peter and Kim Mifsud purchased the family's original property, Wandina, in 1979, before expanding their property holdings and taking on another property called Spokane in 2013.

Peter and Kim run the enterprise with their son Luke and his wife Cat and their two children Harry and Logan.

This season they have 2500 hectares of sorghum and 400 hectares of sunflower in the ground, both grown dryland. Another 1500 hectares has been set aside to be planted with their winter crop of wheat and chickpeas.

The family has planted sorghum varieties MR - Bazley and MR - Buster due to consistent performance. Although they'd tried other varieties with higher yields, their performance was unmatched.

The sorghum was planted in the middle of December and will be harvested in mid to late April.

Luke Mifsud said they'd had a really good strike rate with the sorghum as it was planted into a great seed bed with a full profile of moisture. He was expecting a yield of around 3.7 tonnes to the hectare.

They planted sunflower variety Aussie Gold 62 between early and late January, which would be ready for harvesting around June or July.

"We were pretty happy with the sunflower, not as good strike rate as the sorghum, the seed was very small this year, but we're still pretty happy with it," Mr Mifsud said.

He was expecting anywhere between one tonne to the hectare and 1.5 tonne to the hectare in the sunflowers.

Mr Mifsud said overall the season had been really good, with patchy but good rainfall.

"Some of the earlier sorghum has had almost 200mm of rain on it since it's been planted, so that's really good. The later stuff has lacked a little bit of rain, the storms have been patchy," he said.

Mr Mifsud said last year's sorghum crop was fairly good, and said this year's crop was looking really good until fall armyworm dampened the outlook.

"We would have been up for an exceptional year but fall armyworm has really impacted us," he said.

"It's been in there from early vegetation stage and we've done one spray over all of our sorghum so far.

"I don't really know what the yield loss will be, we'll never really know I suppose.

"It has staggered the crop for head emergence, which has then led to different flowering times, so rather than 10 days, it's taken three or four weeks for it to come out in head emergence.

"When it comes time to harvesting some are going to be ready to go a long time, probably three weeks, before the others in the same crop."

Mr Mifsud said it was the first time they had needed to spray for fall armyworm, with Vantacor and Affirm applied to the crop, a pricey undertaking with a cost estimate of between $40 and $90 per hectare.

"It's a pretty expensive spray, which is the worst part about it, as the way the sorghum prices are it's hard to justify spraying.

"We nearly always spray with ViVus for Heliothis, but that's once its got head usually and this is more before the head, before it boots, so we've been spraying it to try and reduce the damage."

Mr Mifsud said spraying had definitely helped the crop, but he didn't think it had fixed the problem.

"We've still got a lot of fall armyworm in there, I don't know whether we've done the right thing by spraying or not, it's all new up here," he said.

While no fall armyworm had been identified in the sunflower crop, Mr Mifsud said he was keeping a close eye on it.

After harvesting their crops, the family stores them in a 5000 tonne on-farm silo system, preferring to hold onto it to wait for a good price and market opening.

"We've got our on-farm storage that we keep a lot of sorghum on hand for all different markets and we've got sorghum year-round in the silos," Mr Mifsud said.

"We hold onto it to look for a good price and just to fill the market when everyone else has dropped away a bit and we seem to have a few more customers.

"All our stuff is going down towards Brisbane, to different markets down there. We've got a broker and I sell to him and he puts it in different markets," he said.

The sunflowers are sold on a hectare contract and only stored for a couple of months due to the fact it was harder to store and took up space, with a 300 tonne silo only able to storage around 140 tonnes of sunflower.