No concerns about dry sowing in south

Victorian agronomist Matt Witney, Dodgshun Medlin, said given the fully dry topsoil profile, minimising the risk of a partial germination on light rain, farmers were not afraid to embark on dry sowing programs.

He said he had conducted a poll on Twitter which found over 50 per cent of respondents were happy to plant over 50pc of their crop dry, with some responding they were happy to put 100pc in prior to rain.

“It really is a perfect year for dry sowing in that the topsoil is very dry so there are no concerns about false breaks, where you get a patchy germination,” Mr Witney said.

He said many farmers had been chipping away at long season crops such as lupins and vetch over the past month but said farmers would begin to switch to their core program this week.

“The perception of risk has changed, I think this year people will be concerned with the potential for mice damage but other than that they are very confident with their ability to put the crop in dry safely.”

Mr Witney said soil type would play a role in determining how much dry sowing went on.

“Some people have sodic soils that don’t handle dry sowing that well and there you would be a bit cautious but for many others dry sowing works beautifully and the pre-emergent herbicides are very effective.”

Mr Witney said farmers in low rainfall zones, with shorter growing seasons, wanted to maximise every day of growing time to lower the risk of flowering in the heat.

“We want crops flowering in early to mid September here in the Mallee, going later and heat shock damage is more likely than not.”

However, the approach to sowing varies further north.

In central NSW Trangie farmer Tom Quigley said farmers in his area were generally holding off large-scale plants until more was known about the season.

Mr Quigley said he would be comfortable dry sowing some of the plant ahead of forecast rain but would not plant large acreages dry at this point.

“We’ve still got plenty of work to do on the cotton front, so we’ll go ahead with that and maybe put a little bit of crop in around that but we probably won’t go overboard.”

Mr Witney said farmers were not working excessive hours planting at present.

“Things are just ticking along, people are working office hours, there is no need to really hook into it at this stage, but it is helping spread the load so if there is a break there won’t be the need to do those silly hours.”

“The big boys have to get things rolling, but even those with smaller cropping programs seem to like to get at least a portion of their crop in prior to the rain if it is a bit slow in coming.”

In terms of crop choices, Mr Quigley said there would likely be less canola due to the lack of subsoil moisture and the dry start and added a decision would be made on chickpeas in a month.

“There is still plenty of time to plant chickpeas but equally they don’t like it bone-dry.

“If it stays really dry I would imagine there would be a bit of a swing into cereals as they are lower cost and lower risk.”

Mr Witney said Mallee farmers were still focusing on Plan A in terms of their rotations, but added this could be tweaked if it remained dry for a prolonged period.