Berry Partners Deep Dene, Kangaroo Island SA

On our farm, Deep Dene, we run 4500 adult merino sheep and crop 600 hectares. We grow canola, broad beans and wheat. Lloyd’s parents settled here as Soldier Settlers in 1955; we’re the second generation of farmers on Deep Dene.

You run chaff carts and feed the piles to sheep, are there benefits to running a dual enterprise?

We get more value out of the stubble because the sheep don't have to search for grain. We can have a higher stocking rate over the winter growing season and then spread all that stocking rate out over our summer cropping program for a couple of months while they eat the chaff piles. We haven't got a lot of the bad summer weeds, if the sheep are in the paddock early they keep on top of the summer weeds because when the weeds are small they tend to keep nibbling away at them, but if they aren't, melons for example can get away. We don't have to summer spray yet, but I can see it coming.

What do you do after the sheep have eaten the chaff piles? Do you still have to burn?

As we're a higher rainfall area, in a normal year usually the chaff starts to rot and very few weeds comes up, but in a dry year, ryegrass and other weeds will come up. So in those cases we probably should've burnt it. In regards to placement we have crab holes so we call it 'terraforming' and drop the chaff piles into them, it rots even better and cleaner in those situations. 

When did you start hand feeding this year? Without chaff piles when would you have started hand feeding?

We started hand feeding 500g/head/day back at the end of January 2018, before that all our sheep were on chaff piles in the stubble. This year we haven't had rain since the middle of October 2017, so we would've started feeding in December if we didn't have chaff piles, we get a good month or more extra out of our crop paddock feed. We find its easier for the sheep to find all the feed, obviously less walking being in concentrated areas, also it doesn't matter so much if you have grain loss over sieve harvesting, (but we'd still rather sell it than put it through the sheep!)

In your farming system would running a Seed Terminator be a net negative?

For our dual enterprise that extra month of feed is worthwhile, but we might do better crops with the residue retention. If we ran a Seed Terminator it would certainly be harder with the livestock side of things unless of course Kikuyu and all those other summer feeds kick in. If we were 100% crop we would certainly have a Seed Terminator, but with the integration and the synergies of our dual enterprises a chaff cart is a better fit.

Has the chaff cart improved the weed burden in the three years you've been using it?

I can see areas that have been bad, that are now ok, but if we have a non competition year from getting too wet and the crop fails, then the weeds tend to build up quickly. Its up to us to perhaps spray top them in that situation to die it down. but when your collecting the weeds, then killing the weed seed with the sheep and then having a competitive crop its been working really well. I don't think we'd be able to do continuous crop like we've done for 22 years without it. We've only burnt a some paddocks couple of years in that time. Returning residues to the ground is really good, avoiding burning and keeping our reliance off the chemicals.

What crop rotations have you used in the past? How important is the combination of crop rotation, chemicals and HWSC?

In the early days we rotated lupins, wheat and canola. Lupins were ok where they grew really well, but you'd have anywhere from 10% to 50% of the paddock not survive the winter, so all of a sudden every time you grew lupins you would more than quadruple your weeds, especially rye grass. After that we tried rotating just canola and wheat following the dollars, we wanted a legume but didn't know of any that would work well in our environment, other than pasture, but then a couple of growers on the Island brought in broad beans which worked really well. Broad beans built up our rotation and compete fairly well with the weeds. Having three reasonably competitive crops, in addition to the chemical regime, and the collection of seeds with the chaff cart, we feel we can keep going and not have to give up on farming.

Next up Taylor Grain

Nick Berry (left) with his mum and dad Lloyd & Christine Berry on the family farm.