Hi. I am Roger Blanch, and with my wife Nadine and our kids Dakota, Montana and Indiana, we farm on the eastern central downs in Queensland, spread between the area around Clifton and Pittsworth.
Ellangowan is our smaller area, and this goes across to some country at Millmerran, which is mixed farming and grazing. We run from Condamine River flood plains into contoured grazing country, growing predominantly wheat, barley, sorghum, mung beans and some oats for cattle. In total, we farm some 1300 hectares, with about half under crops and the other half under grazing. Nadine and the kids also have a goat stud that they run, just to keep things interesting!
Soil types range from a heavy black soil, sort of an alluvial clay, to a red chocolate soil with basalt rock. We're in a 700mm rainfall region, so we don't get huge rainfall; we get by with a little bit of irrigation.
Interestingly, the majority of our cultivation is on the floodplain, which presents a whole set of different challenges. For us, a flood has the same impact as a drought, and in 2022, we had three crops in a row – mung bean, wheat and sorghum – wiped out. In what we would consider a drought in 2019, we deep-sowed wheat on our floodplain, and while we harvested just over a ton to the acre, we managed to make the most of the available moisture and get a crop when no one else in our area was producing.
From our standing water level to the surface, we are around 15 feet, so the reality of this is that our cropping area wets up quickly. When we have moisture, we plant crops because we essentially farm moisture. Because of this, we don't farm using the traditional crop rotation approach; instead, we focus on what we have available, and thankfully, we get moisture very quickly.
We've already had a little flooding event this year, with the creek nearly breaking its banks. This event is good for us because it's an irrigation event that waters the paddock and puts moisture back into the soil profile. My agronomist doesn't love me doing it this way, but it is about taking advantage of what we have.
We are fortunate to have a good soil type, cracking clay, that seems to wet up quickly in the top 30cm, so we get a good shallow profile quickly, and the cracks close. We recently received close to 100mm, so it is getting to that point where it's starting to get wet. Seed doesn't grow in the bag, so if you want to produce a crop, you need to tap into the stored moisture and get out to plant it.
Last year was probably not the best, but we did just over 4.5t to the hectare of wheat, and as a double crop, we managed 0.75t to the hectare for mung beans. This year, we will be around 3.6t or just a touch over, and while we are not hitting big yields, we are spreading our risk a little bit. This year, we were hampered by an incredibly wet start, with many spots completely drowned out. The rain also encouraged every weed known to man – and some of those winter weeds like Phalaris and Wild Oats are very persistent. They are easy enough to deal with, but they seed and grow so prolifically on the floodplain, making it really hard to control every crop, and that is reflected in our overall yield.
Our long-term average over 20 years bounces around the 3.5-3.8t mark, but that takes into account the wet, challenging years when we do quite poorly.
The way we crop we don't technically fallow, and where we do fallow, it is more for weed control than crop potential. At one point, we introduced mung beans because we have a lot of Johnson's grass, and Johnson's grass and sorghum don't mix. On the back of wheat, mung beans helped control Johnson's grass and provided a protein spike. It was not as much as if we had fallowed, but we avoided having to apply a lot of extra fertiliser.
Planting mung beans in the ground, we can spray some chemicals to control Johnson's grass and a bunch of those broadleaf summer weeds. They are also a quick cash crop. The downside is that they don't like the water and can also be quite finicky. At times, we have sprayed them out at flowering and used them purely as a green manure type of crop, and it does give the wheat a bit of a lift. We live in a unique part of the world, with a cold winter and a nice, hot, wet, steamy summer with a good rainfall pattern. It is all about looking at what we have and making it work.
One of the more challenging things about farming in our area is land prices. In recent times we have seen land trade around us at $10,000 an acre, and it is only going to get more expensive. For younger people trying to get into farming, the numbers make it difficult, and I see a few challenges for the next generation. We have been lucky with timing, buying out my wife's parents property before land prices really started to move. And we have been able to trade up to get more land that is better suited to our operations. We are now at the point where further expansion is difficult, given land prices in our area. With the land we do have, we need to constantly assess how things line up to get a return on our outlay.
In terms of using technology to improve our efficiency, we are trying to stay ahead of the game. We have a camera sprayer, but because of our wet seasonal conditions and a fairly large weed load, it does not really deliver the type of savings that growers in other areas can achieve. Because of that, we are now in the early stages of evaluating how drone technology could address this issue. I have even suggested to our daughters that, if we do buy a drone, they could become licensed not only to undertake our work but also to start a business in contract drone spraying and spreading across the district.
On the grazing side of the operations, we run about 100 breeders and also trade opportunistically some 3-400 head per year, depending on the season. This year, we were late weaning, and it fell in the middle of harvest, making an already busy time even busier.
In my younger days I trained as a diesel fitter but came home to help Mum and Dad on the farm. It was a great move, as far back as I can remember, all I wanted to do was drive a tractor and grow grain. And when we started at Chinchilla, I was addicted to harvesting. My memories of sitting on the old steel floor of the Massey header, looking out through the glass, helped bring me back to farming.
My wife would tell you that I am unemployable and that's why I farm, but it is the challenge and the fact that there is always something different to do. People say that farmers never change, but the reality is that we probably change more quickly than anyone else, because we need to adapt constantly. I like the organised chaos and the change, and I could never sit inside and do the same thing over and over. For me, it is just great to be a farmer.