BROADACRE hybrid seed grown in the Ord River Irrigation Area of the East Kimberley in Western Australia is set to begin its 3500km journey soon.
In a landscape now dominated by sandalwood, chia and fruit crops, workers are busy harvesting Pacific Seeds’ sorghum, forage, corn and sunflower seed, which will be loaded onto trucks bound for the company’s headquarters in Toowoomba.
It will then be processed for sale this summer primarily in Queensland and NSW.
Farm manager Peter Bagley said this year’s harvest at 700 hectare “Cave Springs” and 400ha lease farm “Rumu”, near Kununurra, began on-time last week and they were aiming to have seed on trucks soon.
“We began harvesting some of the crop last week and things are looking good,” he said.
According to Mr Bagley, the ideal time to start sowing was in April, while the best time to harvest was in August or September to avoid October storms.
But unlike typical sorghum farmers who harvest at about 13 per cent moisture, workers at the Ord farms take the crop off at 18 per cent moisture.
“We harvest sorghum at 18 per cent because there’s less damage to the seed at that stage. We then dry it with machines to 12 per cent and load it on trucks to be cleaned, graded and bagged in Toowoomba.”
Mr Bagley said the northern program helped the company reliably and economically meet the demand for summer seed.
“The current water allocation for operations here is 17 megalitres per hectare, per day, so there’s plenty of water available to crops.”
And it turns up when required too.
“We use an online water ordering system where you place an order and 12 hours later your allocation comes through. Most of it is gravity fed, with some of it pumped.”
The farms produce about 30 per cent of the company’s off-season or contra seed – the majority is produced by contract farmers in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area (MIA) in NSW.
Though agronomic practices and weather conditions were ideal this season, the farms have struggled with bird pressure due to the dry.
“We always have bird pressure here but because it’s been drier than normal, there’s not as much natural flora around so the birds eat our crops.”
The main pests this year were white corellas, black cockatoos and galahs.
After trying deterrents such as gas guns, ultrasonic devices and human scarecrows on the ground, Mr Bagley decided to enlist the latest airborne technology.
“We’ve invested in a state-of-the-art agricultural drone that is fully autonomous, produces bird repelling sounds and lights, and can be tailored to your problem bird species via a chip.”
The unit, a Rise Above S900 Scarecrow, cost $8000 – small change compared to the money they were spending on other control measures to protect the valuable crops.
The purchase is set to free up the backpackers for more important jobs like rouging, chipping, weeding, running irrigation and husking corn.
“The backpackers are a really valuable resource to us, and if we can have more of them on these jobs, we can lift productivity.”
The operation employs four full-time staff and up to 40 backpackers at a time depending on the workload, from a range of countries including Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Canada, Ireland, England, Papua New Guinea, Japan and Thailand.
“Despite the language barriers and most of them never being exposed to farming, they are very helpful throughout the year here,” Mr Bagley said.
Pacific Seeds has had a presence in the relatively new agricultural powerhouse area of the north since 1989.
The ORIA began in 1963, with the development of 14,000ha of irrigated farmland, known as Ord Stage 1, coinciding with the opening of the Kununurra Diversion Dam.
In 2012, 13,400ha of land was released for Ord Stage 2 and investigation of the potential of another 6000ha, Ord Stage 3, is underway.
