For Colbinabbin grain grower Thom Hill, the 2024 study tour to WeedSmart Week in South Australia opened a window to the future.
There, on the Eyre Peninsula (EP), he saw farms that been continuously cropped since the late 1990s – about 20 years before he and others around him in central Victoria had transitioned to a similar system.
“We haven’t got as many issues with (herbicide) resistance as they do because we haven’t been in continuous crop for as long, so looking at their chemical use and experience is what I found most interesting,” he says of the tour, which included a conference as well as two days of farm visits.
Thom says that seeing the practices of industry leaders on-farm first-hand, and talking directly to researchers such as herbicide resistance expert Dr Peter Boutsalis from the University of Adelaide, made him confident he was on the right track. “We’re doing 95 per cent of it right and there’s a few things to tweak based on what those farmers have learnt, particularly around how to avoid and overcome ryegrass resistance,” he says. “And it’s as much about what to do as what not to do.”
Weed insights
The importance of rotating chemicals to combat herbicide resistance was one of the key messages reinforced on the tour, Thom says. “And this is relatively easy to do because you can combine old-school chemistry with the new and every two or three years a new product comes out that is more expensive but usually more effective.”
The conference was also “reassuring” in that it promoted the WeedSmart Big 6 practices to reduce weed pressure that he had introduced into his practices, such as increasing crop competition through narrower row spacings.
With export hay sheds and a strong dairy industry on his doorstep, Thom also uses hay production to reduce his weed seedbank.
Whenever we have a really bad ryegrass blowout, we’ll smash it with a rotation of beans, canola and double hay. That’s our fallback.
Personal gain
Thom grows lentils, faba beans, wheat, barley, canola and hay on land he owns and leases, characterised by deep Cambrian red and mulching black soils. He also crops some more acidic country that he neutralises with lime.
He says although the tour was in another state with a different climate and soil types, there was still a lot to learn. “Not everything they’re doing is applicable here, but even with our differences, they’re growing similar crops and using the same chemicals so there was a lot that we had in common,” he says.
Mixing with grain growers from the EP as well as his home turf was also beneficial from both a professional and personal perspective.
“We talked about farming all day, but by the time you’re having a beer at the end of the day, you’re probably ready to start talking about something else,” he says.
“You’ve got to have an outlet, which is why we get involved locally in the kinder, the school and sporting clubs and have family time in the weekend. You can’t just work all the time, and I think our generation is getting better at that.”
Thom says he is thankful to the work behind the scenes that went into organising the study tour and he urges anyone else who has the opportunity to get involved. “All I had to do was turn up with my backpack. I wasn’t in charge of flights or delayed planes or tickets, so to be in someone else’s hands for a change was good.”
More information: To apply, visit GRDC’s Current opportunities and look for grower and adviser study tours.