Hi everyone. I’m Ben Taylor and I farm on the Western Darling Downs, growing wheat and chickpeas in winter, and cotton and grain sorghum in summer. We farm about 5,200 hectares of Brigalow Belah/Gilgai vertosol country. The land has been extensively GPS levelled to improve drainage of our dryland country to remove the Gilgai’s (melon holes).
On average we get about 585mm of annual rainfall, but we have wet and dry years like everyone else. Here, we predominantly get summer rainfall with winter crops grown predominantly on subsoil moisture. We’ve never not planted a crop, so it is quite consistent in a way, but certainly not perfect.
The season so far has been challenging, very wet. We experienced a very dry winter as well as the summer season starting off very dry. We didn’t get a planting opportunity until December. Normally we’d be planting in September but this year, with the dry winter and spring we didn’t get a planting opportunity until December after some beautiful rain in November. Our sorghum crop has had a really good run since being planted and is looking good. We’ve had 200mm of rain on the sorghum crop since it was sprayed out, so it has been a very tedious harvest to date. The upside is it has set us up well for our winter crop of which the planting is on point. It's about a week late with early varieties, but otherwise is going very well and we have great subsoil moisture at the moment. We’ve even had enough rain to take an opportunity to double crop chickpeas into sorghum country which is an exciting prospect with Indian tariffs reduced recently and pricing currently at $1000/tonne.
At the moment we’re trying not to be bogged in the header while harvesting sorghum and planting wheat. We’ve got the spray rig going, a couple of trucks on the go and seed grading. Plenty on the go, nothing out of the norm.
There’s no doubt getting sorghum harvest done without making a mess of paddocks and controlled traffic/tram lines is a challenge at the moment. Sorghum classifications have been varied with differences between receival locations. While it’s been a challenging wet end to Summer, it has left us with some great prospects for winter and full ring tanks ready for a full irrigation program next summer.
I feel optimistic of the opportunities it will give my family and the generation coming through. Whether they are farmers or not, I believe they will be positioned well. It’s an exciting time to be involved in agriculture, I love the advancements in technology, breeding programs and management practices to grow our crops. We are well supported by some fantastic people in industry, and we have the opportunity to really kick some goals.