Short interview from GCTV19 (YouTube) featuring Lyndon Mickel and family discussing their Esperance-area cropping property (140 km east of Esperance) purchased in 1996. They describe using a delver to break hard silica topsoil and incorporate orange dome clay (best results where clay occurs 200–300 mm deep), improving root penetration and doubling yields in delved areas; they also trial different incorporation machinery (grizzly offset disc vs a spader) to determine long-term best practice for the farm’s succession.
Questions this video answers
140 kilometres east of Esperance.
1996.
Anywhere from 200 to 300 millimetres.
Chapters
We're on family farming operation with my parents, Ian and Veronica and my wife nikki, myself. We're 140 kilometres to the east of Esperance. We bought this property in 1996 to expand our cropping operation. Soils aren't too bad but we've noticed over time there's a bit of a non wetting issue in the lighter country, particularly at the front of this farm. The delver's made a huge difference for us. It's really opened up the soils. We're finding that our root penetration is a lot better. So the plants are gaining access to that moisture and nutrients down underneath by cracking up that top soil, the hard silica part on top of the dome clays. It's allowing those roots to get down for us.
Wherever the delver's been, the crop's always significantly better. The heads are longer, there's a lot.
More.
Potential yield there. And 99 times out of 100 the crop probably is yielding twice it is in the inter row with the delving target.
The right areas. Best form is not so much technology path. Go out with a shovel, dig down, see how deep the clays are. It's a slow process but it's very, very worthwhile.
This is some of the better clays on our country, this beautif orange clay. When we see that come up, you know we're really smiling because we know that we will get great success from it.
Ian's the brains behind the whole thing. He's the one that's constructed the machine from the bits of steel that come in the rack to he even does the operation on it still now. So he's extremely critical to this operation. For me, Anywhere from 200 to 300 millimetres. It's perfect delving country and as you can see from some of the footage we've taken today, we're getting real good results from that. Once we do the passing with the delving, we normally come back and we incorporate with the cross working at 90 degrees to the delve lines with a grizzly offset disc. We're not sure if we're getting the incorporation down deep enough. So the reason for putting the trial in is to have a look at that alongside of one of the other machines that they're using at the moment. She's the spader and hopefully from this over a number of years we should be able to see which one is the best incorporation which will give us some indication which way we're going to head down. I've got a family to come through, I've got a daughter that's interested in agriculture. So we'd like to think we're going to be here for the long run.
