Crop Sequencing in the Mallee with Tim Paschke

My name's Tim pashke. We farm 20k south of Wakerie. The farm's name is Kalparra. We've got 1600 hectares of our own and the rest is leased and share farm. So yeah, equals 4,000 hectares. The reason we started crop sequencing was the fact that we couldn't sustain how we were farming continuously, continuously wheat and barley. And so we decided that. And also nitrogen was being depleted. So we decided that the best thing we could do from MSF that we saw in Mildura was that we would go into a vetch program where we could actually remove the grass pressure for our wheat and hopefully get the benefits of the nitrogen being incorporated back into the soil. So originally we were a wheat, wheat, barley, barley rotation. Generally wheat obviously is our bread and butter crop. So we have now into a six year rotation which involves canola, then we go into a clear field wheat and then we'll go back to a vetch or a vet Ola and then we will probably go into a wheat, barley, wheat rotation. And then depending on the pressure of the grass, we would then go back to either onto another wheat or we'd go back to a canola as a next spray crop. The crops are healthier, the grass pressure is massively reduced. We're not putting as much pressure on our Clearfield chemistries as if you were just coming into a brown grass situation and just spraying the Clearfield out. So we've got our numbers down a huge amount and obviously this year coming forward, hopefully the wheat yield is there as well and the proteins are up so low. Bank Ag Bureau two years ago did a trial of 15 different legumes and we had wheat on that last year. And the benefits we saw out of that was on the pea wheat rotation. There was a 0.5 of a tonne increase in terms of yield. So so far it looks promising. And that was obviously sown on the same day with the same rainfall. So going forward it looks exciting for the Mallee.