Rebecca Kelly spent seven years working and travelling her way around the globe before making the conscious decision to return to one of Australia’s biggest wheat growing regions and establish a career in agriculture.

While her worldwide journey went full circle with her return to the family farm, it was the opportunities in agriculture and the chance to be involved in a sector crucial to feeding the world’s booming population that drove her decision.

Rebecca and her parents, Paul and Sue, operate a 3200-hectare cropping enterprise near Mingenew in the West Australian mid-west/midlands region – about 400 kilometres north of Perth and 100km south of the regional city of Geraldton.

While Mingenew is a dot on the nation’s map, home to just 500 people, the region is at the heart of Australian wheat growing and a powerhouse of production, boasting the largest inland grain receival site in the southern hemisphere.

It’s a region which depends on people like the Kellys – committed to sustainable agriculture, and striving for growth and productivity through efficiency and innovation.

The Kelly business is 100 per cent cropping. They grow the mainstay crops of wheat, lupins, canola and improved pastures as well as a niche crop, coriander, which they sell as seed on the world market.

Agriculture: a clear career choice

To say Rebecca took the scenic route to her current career on the farm would be an understatement.

Rebecca studied marketing then took a gap ‘year’ which turned into seven years working and travelling abroad.

From a summer camp in America teaching kayaking, canoeing and swimming to backpacking through Asia then time as a tour guide in South America, Rebecca then spent five years as a Top Deck tour guide in Europe.

Rebecca insists returning to the family farm wasn’t something she fell into, or fell back on.

“I’ve been to 70 countries in the world, I’ve got a degree, I’m not just someone who has fallen into this career.

It’s been quite a calculated move to come back into agriculture and despite some common misconceptions, it’s not a ‘backwards’ industry.

Rebecca went to Marcus Oldham College in 2016 to study a Bachelor of Agribusiness and has been back full time on the farm since 2018.

She says her days are determined by the seasons and her many and varied tasks and roles, both in the office and the paddock, defined by their cropping production cycle.

Managing climate for a sustainable future

The WA cropping program is almost entirely winter-based due to low summer rainfall and heat extremes.

Rebecca believes having the skills and knowledge to deal with those extremes and manage the cropping program through climate variability is crucial to the sustainability of both their business and their land.

“I’m learning that there is no average season. Every year people keep saying, ‘gosh that was a strange season’ but I’m learning that there is no normal anymore. Just odd climatic events.”

Take last year, for example. Rebecca said her area endured a massive windstorm event in May – one of those one-in-100 year events – followed by below-average rain in June and July, then substantial August rain which saved their crops.

Rebecca now takes a ‘what’s normal?’ view of weather and weather patterns,  and says working with the weather today requires farmers having access to top-level knowledge and the tools to support that to help manage climate variability.

Research and innovation crucial to modern agriculture

She said cropping farmers in WA have depended a lot on research and innovation to enable them to push boundaries to grow more from less.

The technology that’s come about has helped us manage unpredictable weather and seasons – new technology, new seed varieties, improved chemicals, new information that we’ve got. We’ve got so many tools compared to 10, 20 and 50 years ago.

She says sustainability to her is the ability to continue farming in her environment for the long term.

“I think agriculture is just going to get more important than ever before,” Rebecca said.

“I know it’s a tag line that everyone uses but feeding and clothing the world is a very important job, and with the increase in the world’s population it is going to be even more of a challenge,” Rebecca said.

Fast facts about Australian wheat

Grain growing in Australia

Winter cropping is a crucial component in Australian food production.

When the drought broke last year, Australian farmers grew the second largest volume of cereal and oilseed crops on record.

2020 Australian winter grain and oilseed production hit 51.5 million tonnes – a 76 percent increase on the previous year.

Australian farmers produced 31.2 million tonnes of wheat last year – enough to feed.

Wheat from the West

Western Australian farmers are a huge part of the Australian cropping story

Wheat is the major grain crop produced in Western Australia generating $2-3 Billion for the State economy each year.

WA generates about 50 per cent of Australia’s total wheat production with more than 95% of this exported predominantly to Asia and the Middle East.

WA produces white grained wheat varieties that generate high flour milling yield and a bright white flour that is suitable for a range of products.

The post Best career in the world: feeding the world appeared first on AustralianFarmers.

Winter crops are annual crops sown in autumn and are ready to harvest in spring or summer.

Here is what winter looks like around farms in Australia…

Grains

Wheat barley and oats are Australian farmer’s favourite winter grains!

However this year winter crop production is expected to be down. The Rabobank Australian 2019 Winter Crop Outlook said it would be ‘against all odds’ for Australia to return to average grain production in the 2019-20 season. This is due to the dry start to the winter cropping season meaning ‘sub-optimal planting window’ for important cropping regions.

Oils

The Australian oilseed industry produces about three million tonnes of oilseeds annually – 600,000 of those tones are consumed locally.

Australia’s major oilseed crops – canola and cottonseed – account for 90 per cent of local production.

Australia supplies more than one million tonnes of canola seed (15-20 per cent of the world’s canola trade) to Japan, Europe, China, Pakistan and other international markets annually.

Pulses

Pulses such as lupins, chickpeas, lentils and fava beans are now make up 10 per cent of the three major cropping regions of Australia.

Pulses are relatively new to Australian soil with the first crop, navy beans, planted in Queensland in the 1940’s to feed the US troops during World War II.

Australia produces an average of 2.2 million tonnes of pulses from more than 1.8 million hectares.

Vegetables

The Australian vegetable industry represents more than six per cent of the total value of Australian agriculture at $3.45 billion with more than 2,300 vegetable farm businesses.

More than 90 per cent of all fresh vegetables sold in Australian supermarkets are grown right here in Australia with potatoes coming in at the number one winter vegetable commodity with more than 1.3 million tonnes grown for human consumption a year!

Tomatoes (426,000 tonnes), carrots (318,000 tonnes), onions (277,000 tonnes) and head lettuce (128,000 tonnes) trail potatoes as the most common vegetable commodities grown and sold in Australia.

Thanks to Australia’s varying climates and geographical benefits of the array of vegetable growing regions around Australia, the vegetable industry can maintain year-round supply, meaning there are very few fresh veggies imports into Australia.

Fruit

The Australian fruit industry is produces around 2.66 million tonnes a year valued at more than $5 billion.

The most popular fruit grown in Australia is by far citrus, particularly oranges with Australian farmers producing around 746,297 tonnes a year.

Citrus fruits thrive in cool climates and are the biggest winter fruit commodity export in Australian agriculture.

Bananas, apples and melons trail not far behind as the most productive fruit crops grown in Australia ($798 million).

The post Australia’s 5 favourite winter crops appeared first on AustralianFarmers.

Interest in growing lavender in Australia has increased significantly over the last 5 years. There are now plantings in all States with the most interest in Victoria and southern New South Wales.

The majority of lavender plantings are for craft and aromatherapy applications and can be found in tea rooms, bed and breakfast operations or open gardens and nurseries. The main use for lavender by these growers is dried flowers, followed by fresh flowers and then oil production. Other products include lavender honey, lavender based body care products and therapeutic formulations containing lavender oil.

The variation in scale of oil production operations is considerable with the majority of lavender growersproducing less than 10 kg of oil per annum, approximately 50 – 60 growers. At the other end of the scale is the operation of Bridestowe Estate in Tasmania producing 1200 kg of oil per annum.

Compared to most other agricultural crops lavender can provide an excellent return from a small area with the best lavender returns coming from agri-tourism.

Ziggy outlined his journey, speaking with SBS.

“The first four years it didn’t work. I couldn’t get it growing. But because the sun in Tasmania is strong you need more shade cover. More than half an hour of sun through the day will kill the plant.

“People don’t realise how long the plants take to grow – two years just for the seeds to germinate, and then four to six years for the plants to mature,” Ziggy says.

Ziggy admits that commercial success has been a long journey but what’s important is staying true to his passion. He also reckons it’s important to be a little bit crazy.

The Noonan’s home-based business, located in Glaziers Bay in southern Tasmania, co-ordinates the sole network of Saffron growers in Australia. There are currently 60 growers in the network here and in New Zealand.

“The key [if the business was to succeed] was that the saffron had to be top grade,” said Nicky Noonan, speaking with Grow Your Business.

Tas-Saff produces extra category one saffron under the International Organisation of Standardisation. The business is working with the University of Tasmania, the research being funded by AgriFutures (previously the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation), to ensure quality remains the best it can be.

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