Hi, I’m Megan Baker, and I farm with my husband Mark, a third-generation farmer, about halfway between Springsure and Rolleston in the Central Queensland Highlands.
Our farm covers around 8,600 hectares, where we grow everything from chickpeas to wheat. At the moment, we’ve just started harvesting our wheat and chickpeas. Both crops are looking really good, particularly the chickpeas, which we’re excited about. We have just finished our wheat with an average of 3.7t/ha, which we're stoked about.
The only thing that isn’t overly exciting is that the prices decided to take a bit of a dive, but I guess that’s just the joys of the ride. We have a little bit of wheat in, and there’s not a lot of it about, so as my Dad says, what you lose on the stretch you make on the roundabout!
Last year, we only had a bit of chickpea in because we hadn’t received too much rain to plant, so we had everything planted to sorghum and some mung beans. We are fully dryland and had really good rain just before it was time to plant sorghum, so it made sense to plant when we did, because you’re not guaranteed rain when it comes time to plant the winter crop. We put some chickpeas in the mung bean country, but it didn’t do very well. Thankfully, we already had a crop that year, so we just had to take that.
There are always lots of different challenges on farm. At the moment, one of our biggest challenges, along with most others, is inputs. If it’s not price, it’s availability, and once you get price and availability sorted, it’s about whether you’re allowed to use it for much longer, which can be quite challenging.
On a more positive note, we’ve just invested in two See & Sprays to help minimise our chemical use and save costs as well. Mark originally bought one and really liked it and saw the benefit of it, so we’ve just bought another one to get over the country in the time we need to.
In our area around Orion, we’ve got a community hall where everyone gets together once a month for a tennis night, though it’s not really a tennis night, even though that’s what it’s always been called. It’s more of a BBQ and social gathering for everyone, which is always great fun. Both of our boys were home a few weeks ago and played rugby league for the Mountain Men, following in their Dad’s footsteps, so we also like going down to support the local footy club now and then.
There are many reasons why I love being an Australian grain grower alongside Mark. If you want to get really soppy, at the end of the day, we feed the world – not just this part of the world, but far and wide. Last year, our sorghum was in one of the first loads that went overseas to Madagascar, and we were able to watch it being loaded into the ship, which was pretty special.