Alastair – Baraja Station, Riverina NSW

“Our business is broadacre cropping and at the moment we’ve got 94 hectares of corn in which we hope to harvest next week; it’s feed corn, not for human consumption. And in the meantime we’re sowing our canola, which is mostly in, and when that’s done we’ll be sowing barley and wheat, and when that’s finished we’ll be busy spreading urea and feeding those crops, keeping them free of weeds, and that’ll take us right through to August.” “A dryland, broadacre cropping system is pretty well what we have and it has evolved over the years; we used to farm peas and lupins but found them unprofitable but they were good because they’re a great crop for putting nitrogen back into the soil. We’ll go back to those at some stage but at the moment we’re in a pattern of canola, wheat and barely and then a pasture phase, so we can control weeds in a pasture phase. So if we go into a pasture phase for two to three years, we make sure that weed seeds don’t set seed; that means we spray top them in spring and ensure we get the seed bank of undesirable weeds in the soil lower before it goes back into a cropping cycle. What that means is that, once we’re in that cropping cycle we don’t have to use chemicals as much and it becomes much more profitable with higher yielding results.”