Farm in Focus – Simon Goode, St Arnaud, Vic
- By: "Farm Tender" News
- US & World News
- Oct 07, 2018
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By Louisa Ferrier - BCG
Simon Goode farms north of St Arnaud at Gooroc and Sutherland with wife Naomi and parents Denis and Patricia. He and Naomi have two boys, Oliver, 4 and Oscar, 1.
Their farming business comprises cropping, export and domestic hay and merino ewes.
How much rain have you received this year and in the growing season?
We’ve had 159mm for the whole year with only 7mm received outside the growing season in January.
We’re getting to the end of the season now, what are your predictions for harvest on your farm? Will you harvest grain or will it all be hay?
We’re taking a day by day approach in our decision to cut for hay or go through to harvest for grain.
Our rotation is designated to approximately 25 per cent area for hay comprising oats for export and a mix of vetch and barley for the domestic market.
The header is currently cutting a barley crop that was planned for grain but it’s on heavy country (‘grey pug’). All our canola is growing on 2017 chemical fallow so we’re doing the numbers on that.
We’re still aiming to leave 10 per cent of our total cropping area for seed and we continue to look at the weather forecast for rainfall or frost events.
We have some wheat on 2017 chemical fallow which still looks good enough to harvest for grain so we’ll assess it in 2 weeks.
In general, hay has been a winner in terms of weed control and cashflow.
We’ve been cutting out ‘ryegrassy’ patches of our crops since the early 90’s but started producing hay as a separate enterprise in 2007. Since then we’ve slowly built up the collection of hay making equipment and now we generally sow vetch in the first year followed by oaten hay followed by vetch again then canola to get good mechanical weed control. Sometimes these paddocks are the most profitable.
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What have you learned from this season and will this change how you manage your paddocks in 2018?
Two main things:
One: when you’re going through a year with low subsoil moisture, know how much a paddock owes you. Then be able to react to the conditions with the right inputs or treatment. Don’t pigeon-hole yourself.
Two: The value of holding grain or hay in the high production years can assist cashflow. A lot of grain bags and stored hay has gone off the farm this year.
What have you been doing with sheep enterprise lately?
All our sheep are grazing on planned pastures at the moment. We get more value out of hay than grazing our crops, so they won’t go onto any failed crops. We shear every 8 months so that was done last week.
Have you confirmed your plans eg. rotations and marketing for 2019?
We try to stick to a rigid 5-year rotation and manage two main soil types on the property.
The heavy clay country is generally sown to a canola, wheat, lentil, barley and chemical fallow rotation and the lighter country is more flexible with mainly vetch and oats.
8-10 per cent of our property is sown to pasture of Moby barley or a winter active wheat like a Rosella.
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