NEWS
Page 4, North East Farmer
June 2014
No complaints in sowing wet April rain and further good falls in May – now the wheat’s emerging INSIDE THE FENCE with Murray Gilby
WHAT brilliant opening rains for the farming community. We had 100 millimetres during April followed by a further 32 millimetres during the first 10 days of May. Our sowing program has suffered a few delays, mainly waiting for stubble paddocks to dry enough to spray and sow, but we aren’t complaining. Our wheat program has now been completed and we are starting to see plants emerging. The wheat has been sown on canola stubble that has been boarded flat, and this has allowed earlier emergence than would otherwise be expected. We have had to use a different strategy with the barley paddocks. There has been a heavy covering of grasses and broadleaf weeds, so we decided to spray with
MURRAY GILBY, with wife Denise and son Colin, farm a 700 hectare cropping property at Kotupna, 30 kilometres east of Echuca. The farming enterprise includes cropping canola, barley and wheat, along with an agricultural contracting business, supplying customers with all their cropping needs.
knockdowns first to obtain a good kill then spray Stomp or Treflan before sowing. This ensures that the second application of spray will hit the ground and not be held up by the lush growth. We also hired a disc chain that we used over 200 hectares to work down growth and level out lumps of stubble from last year’s sowing program. About 120 hectares of this 200 will be sown to peas. This year, besides our TM Agricultural biostimulant program, we are trialling a new Best product called TM Germinator. This is applied direct
to the seed before sowing. TM Germinator is designed to help create early vigor in the crops by having the nutrients readily available because they have been directly applied to the seed. We have had a hectic few weeks with the transport side of things even as we try to get the sowing under control. Grain and Milk Maker have been flying along the highways. What looks to be a quiet week, quite often turns into a busy one – all it takes is a phone call or two. I can usually mange to help out for a few hours each day, so between us we are getting things done.
LINKS: Beechworth’s Karen Nankervis (left), Myrrhee’s Cheryl Graham, Stanley’s Colette McNeill and Trish Curtis at the Connecting Rural Business Women conference in Beechworth in May.
Women network BEECHWORTH business coach and project manager Kristy Howard has encouraged women in rural and regional areas who are starting their own enterprises to keep an eye on small jobs and contracts as aids to cashflow. The agricultural scientist told participants at the 2014 Connecting Rural Business Women conference in Beechworth that she set out five years ago to share her skills with like-minded entrepreneurial women who were raising families. Dr Howard – a meat and livestock specialist who has subse-
quently worked in farmers’market development and devising rural marketing strategies – said that she had survived in a developing consultancy business, based in Beechworth, but that a young family had changed her approach. “I set out to work to inspire people to achieve excellence in all aspects,” Dr Howard said. She said that this involved encouraging individuals and communities to move from “the safe to the scary” – challenging people’s abilities to do more. Dr Howard was one of the key
workshop speakers at the conference. It attracted almost 100 women from regional Victoria, New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland. The opening keynote speaker was Gold Coast-based media and communications specialist Karen Phillips. The conference – in its fourth year – was officially opened by Cathy McGowan (MHR, Indi) by video. Ms McGowan was visiting Papua New Guinea.
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