While grazing cattle and sheep quietly move through the Mitchell grass plains of Boyd Webb’s outback station, a harvester is reaping what he has sown in a nearby paddock.
His property at Muttaburra sits in the geographical centre of Queensland and the heart of its grazing country, but for the past four seasons it has also been home to a cropping experiment.
Growing grain without irrigation, he plans to bury the sorghum being cut as insurance for the next time the rain stops and his pasture dies.
But far from an outlier, he is part of a growing push to grow crops in the bush.
Crops bring stability
Mr Webb has sown more than 280 hectares of dry land sorghum between his cattle and sheep paddocks that he will use to feed his animals in the next dry.
“As sure as night follows day, it will get dry in this country again,”
Mr Webb said.
A harvester cuts the sorghum crop before it is stored in a silage pit. (ABC Rural: Maddelin McCosker)
Spat into the back of a truck, the cut sorghum is moved to a deep pit that can store up to 3,000 tonnes of feed for years.
Stored this way, the green plant material ferments and becomes silage, a kind of “pickled pasture” that preserves the nutrients.
The silage will allow Mr Webb to keep feeding stock long after the grass stops growing.
“We’re not [going to be] pushed into a corner and have to sell [stock] because we’ve run out of feed or it hasn’t rained,” he said.
“If we hit four or five dry years in a row, we’d have enough feed up our sleeves to get us through it.”
He plans to expand his crop to more than 600 hectares next year, increasing the amount of feed he can store on the property.
The sorghum is cut, compressed and stored in pits in the ground. (ABC Rural: Maddelin McCosker)
Eventually, he wants to have 20,000 tonnes of silage sorghum in storage.
“There’ll be droughts here every few years, so the fact that we can grow in a good season and put it away for a dry season is going to be worth a lot,” he said.
“Building up to that over a period of time would allow us to basically feed every animal on the place for a year.”
While recent years have been a much-needed reprieve from the decade-long millennium drought, Mr Webb said those dry times still weighed heavily on the minds of producers.
Growing the sorghum allowed him to diversify and offered stability to his business in a part of the country where turbulent weather was common.
Boyd Webb says growing sorghum has been a steep learning curve. (ABC Rural: Maddelin McCosker)
Growing dry land crops that rely on rain for moisture might seem risky in country known for its dry times, but Mr Webb said the rain in good seasons was enough to store moisture in the soil and plants.
“If you’ve got enough moisture to grow Mitchell grass, you’ve got enough moisture to grow sorghum,”
he said.
A tractor is used to push and compress cut sorghum in a pit. (ABC Rural: Maddelin McCosker)
“It may be that you don’t plant a crop every year, maybe [you do it] every second year.
“Basically, you keep letting it rain, store the moisture, and then once you’ve got enough moisture there to grow your crop, you can grow it.”
A steep learning curve
Mr Webb is not alone in experimenting with growing his own feed.
In the Northern Territory some of the biggest names in cattle have applied for permits to clear country for cropping, including Gina Rinehart’s Helen Springs Station and Consolidated Pastoral Company (CPC).
At a recent Farm to Feed forum in Katherine, Andrew Cochrane, who previously managed CPC’s Isis Downs station in western Queensland but now runs Newcastle Waters, shared their approach.
He said while some feed and supplements were still brought in, having access to their own feed had benefits, especially for younger cattle.
“That weaning process … it’s a very integral time and a big stress period on those animals,” Mr Cochrane said.
“You can smooth that out and keep them on a rising growth plane, we’re turning those cattle off much sooner than in previous years.
“It’s a two-fold benefit — it’s not just those weaners doing well and gaining weight, it’s the cow’s body condition [as well].”
‘A whole new world’
Tony Hayne is a vet, cattle producer and cotton grower at Douglas Station.
He planted silage hay this year and used cottonseed to supplement during the dry season, when protein was hard to source in the Top End.
“It takes a lot of pressure off through the dry and it’s a by-product of the cotton,” he said.
“For us, it’s probably almost as important as the white, fluffy stuff that comes off.”
The cropping experiment is unusual in Muttaburra, which is in the heart of grazing country. (ABC Rural: Maddelin McCosker)
In the four years since Mr Webb started experimenting, he has grown oats for hay and two sorghum crops before this latest crop.
He said “farmer error” had forced a steep learning curve with every new crop he planted.
“It’s a whole new world,” he said.
“Probably the biggest limiting factor is how quickly we can absorb it, understand it and implement it … to an outsider there’s a lot to learn.
Boyd Webb hopes the sorghum crop will feed his stock through the next drought. (ABC Rural: Maddelin McCosker)
“I knew nothing about ploughs and planters, and I still don’t know anything, but I’m having an accelerated learning curve.”
To get started, Mr Webb purchased second-hand machinery and equipment, and while that initial outlay could be expensive, he said older equipment did the job.
“When I started, all our farming equipment was basically less than what you’d buy a buggy for,” he said.
“It doesn’t have to be expensive because we’re not trying to grow a cereal crop.
“I think that’s where farming is going to end up out here. It won’t be for growing cereals, it’ll be for supporting the livestock industry.”
Boyd Webb runs cattle and sheep alongside his sorghum crop at Weewondilla. (ABC Rural: Maddelin McCosker)
