Farming through the Dry with Matt Eckhert

Jon Paul Driver 0:08
Welcome to the Hay Matters podcast brought to you by LocalAg and Feed Central. This is your go to source for all things hay related in Australia. I’m your host, Jon Paul Driver, in today’s episode, we’re joined by Matt Eckert, Matt farms in South Australia, east of Adelaide, and the nearest recognisable town would be Meningie. I had the good fortune to be able to visit Matt and his brother Tim, a couple of years ago when I was touring around.

Matt Eckert 0:35
Yeah g’day, Jon, thanks for having me.

Jon Paul Driver 0:37
I have very fond memories of visiting, oh, a shop that would make anybody turn green with envy, very well laid out, well equipped and just truly well thought out I am envious. And then some of your local growing conditions maybe we can talk about that are mind boggling to me. I very distinctly remember stories of your grandfather clearing land and the undercutter that you still have the piles of sticks. That tells the stories of years and years of work building a farm, just one of my favourite stops when I was in Australia.

Matt Eckert 1:18
Glad you enjoyed it. Jon,

Jon Paul Driver 1:20
Oh, I did. It’s one of the questions I wanted to ask about is Lucerne. Obviously, it’s deep rooted. I mean, they say, oh, sorry, I’m having to do the Metric Conversion. I don’t know. Six metres down is what the roots will go on on the tour stand,

Matt Eckert 1:35
yes, yeah, that they’ll go down a long way, that’s for sure. And they hold on for the longest of any but you know, this dry spell certainly tested it, especially our young Lucerne, like that’s really struggled. Yeah, it just hasn’t got its tap root down deep enough yet. So, yeah, it just thins it out and takes away, I guess, the ability to opportunities moving forward. Oh, yeah, if you damage the young Lucerne, the stand is never the same again, yep, that’s exactly right. So, I mean, it’ll be okay. We’ll go on with it and because it will still provide quite good feed. But we won’t be, I don’t think there’ll be any opportunities for things like lucerne hay and that off of it until we get around to sort of fixing it up. But we just, we’ve just lost too much country in the last over the last two years, with a couple of tough springs, and we just need some time to get back around. I guess

Jon Paul Driver 2:28
consistent rains is what you I mean. Is the answer to the problem?

Matt Eckert 2:32
It is Yes. Yep.

Jon Paul Driver 2:34
Now did has that Lucerne been planted in the last year?

Matt Eckert 2:38
Yeah. So we just did 400 hectares of new renovation to lucerne this last season. Obviously, that was on we Plozza ploughed it. It’s all bottomless sand, like beach sand, non wetting, non wedding sand. So we Plozza ploughed it, and yeah, it. We sewed barley on it, and we ripped the barley, and then we sewed lucerne into the stubble. And it’s very surprising what is there today, but certainly struggling along. That’s for sure.

Jon Paul Driver 3:07
My question there is, can you go back and intercede more Lucerne, if it’s been I think, I mean, the research says you don’t get the auto toxicity issues until that 15 months after seeding. And if it’s been drought stressed, maybe the because I understand that the metacarpons that are the auto toxin, they don’t form until the plants are a little more mature. And if they’re drought stressed, maybe there’s less metacarpon production. Yeah, we’re exploring on the very edges of like, in the most extreme conditions, right?

Yes, yes. And I think if I was to, if I was to do anything about it, I’d probably blow it out and sow it back to barley and then start again, just for that very hard to get lucerne established. When you’re struggling on rains, it’s just not, just not enough moisture there to get the young stuff going. The stuff that is there won’t let the young lucerne, get going. Yeah. So I’d probably spray it out, disc it back, so barley on it, and give it a year that, you know, you get some instant cash flow back then and and then just start again, and hope you’re having a better run. But I mean, in saying that Jon, like, you know, in the last sort of, I don’t know would be well well, over 10 years now, we haven’t had a failure as far as re establishing new Lucent pastures. So, and I definitely wouldn’t say this is a failure, it’s just maybe not quite where we would like it. And I mean, 2006 that was the last year we really struggled with new seeding, lucerne, you know, just dry spring, late season, strong winds all year, that was the last time we probably actually failed a lucerne establishment. So if you look at the big picture, I mean, we always talk about the game we’re playing. A long game. So I guess in the end of the day, it’s not really that bad

To win 90% of the time is okay, but…

Matt Eckert 5:08
That’s exactly right…

Jon Paul Driver 5:09
But that 10%, that one year, doesn’t feel really good.

Matt Eckert 5:12
Not when you not when you’re in it and you live in it every day, it certainly becomes challenging. Yeah, yeah,

Jon Paul Driver 5:17
You’ve already mentioned non wetting sands. Tell me about some of the growing conditions.

Matt Eckert 5:26
Firstly, by just filling in where we are. You said we’re at Meningie . And Meningie is situated on the lower lakes in SA so like at Lake Albert and Lake Alexandrina, and we’re fortunate to farm right at the end of that that mighty river system. My dad’s homestead farm is on the lake Alexandrina, right where the river ends. And we very lucky to farm here. I think it’s a beautiful area, but one of our massive challenges is obviously limestone rocks and into salt lakes and so on, and then moving down into our non wetting sand country. And it’s a huge challenge for us. It’s a rewarding challenge. But non wetting sand is a funny, funny one, like you get that 2030, mm of repellent sand on top, and nothing will grow in it. It just won’t wet up. The water will run off. It’ll run to the hollows. Takes a lot to get it wet and just one of those extreme challenges that we face in our local area, but with modern techniques now, with soil amelioration, deep ripping Plaza plough and all that sort of stuff, we’ve worked out ways that we can handle it, and and it’s been extremely rewarding the outcomes that we’ve achieved off of sands. And yeah, we’re not in a huge rainfall area with about 400 million rainfall, but we can stretch that rainfall a long way with some strategic management and things like that.

Jon Paul Driver 6:58
And does that the timing of that rainfall, I know it’s a particular concern right now, but normally, would the timing of that rainfall occur in crop?

Matt Eckert 7:08
Yeah, normally, I mean, we’re very fortunate here. We are fairly coastal, not far off the coastline there, and we get sort of rain. Obviously, November, December, January and February are normally our driest months. But other than that, we sort of normally get quite good rains throughout the entire season, and that’s what keeps our sand going. It’s yeah, we grow our crops and our passes on 10 to 20 mil rain events. You know throughout the year. You know that consistent, reliable rainfall, not massive, but reliable, instant key to us producing stuff.

Jon Paul Driver 7:43
Now let’s talk a little bit about some of those soil amendments that you’re making. You’re actually adding rather large volumes of clay to that sand to increase your water penetration and retention, right?

Matt Eckert 7:59
Yeah, Clay spreading is a massive part of our soil amelioration programme here, and we’ve done hundreds and hundreds of acres of it. Obviously, the clay spreading is the permanent fix to our non wetting sand issue, getting that wettable clay up and mix through our non wetting sand layer. That is the ultimate sort of fix to our problem, but it’s the most expensive, it’s the most time consuming, and you’ve got to be able to find it also so on, on our northern side of our farm, where you would say we do a lot more cropping, we’re sort of clay spreading all the sand in between our cropping country, simply because we can genuinely find the clay. As you head south, we head down into, you know, deeper sands. So, I mean, you can dig all your like out there. You’re just not going to find clay. It’s not there. We have rising salt water levels coming up from salinity from underneath. So, you know, all of those things there are, you know, add to the challenge. And when you can’t find clay, you gotta somehow come up with another way. And that’s where our deep ripping and our Plozza ploughing, inverting that sand is a big game changer to it to what we do.

Jon Paul Driver 9:15
That ploughing that you’re doing, how deep are you going? And on the deep ripping?

Matt Eckert 9:19
When we’re deep ripping. We were running our Terra land, and it was sort of ripping between 400 to 700 mil, you know, where it’s good done a bit of delving, you know, delving You’re going down, you know, down to a metre. But you bring up a lot of unwanted things when you start diving things in at a metre deep inside a mansion. Oh, rocks, mate. They just float to the top and huge amount of limestone, Rubble, limestone underneath this country. So it’s got to be extremely careful. I mean, we want to say the Bednar, and that the biggest fault with and they just don’t lift quick enough hit the rocks. And you just can’t get them out the ground quick enough. So hence why we run the Plozza ploughing system. It’s it’s built off of like the principles of a moldboard plough without obviously a mobile plough is way more efficient. But if we put a moldboard plough in the ground here, we’d hit the first rock, and we’d be smashing plates and all sorts of things. Whereas the Plozza plough sort of allows us to hydraulic jumps on it, jumps up over the rocks, rocks a few out, but yeah, leaves a lot behind too, and doesn’t destroy the machine. So that’s why we’ve been running the Plozza plough system.

Jon Paul Driver 10:34
All right, you’ve been doing this for several years. What is the outcome during the present drought. Can you tell the difference in the fields that you’ve done your soil amendments and different different practices, too? Or is the drought so severe that it really hasn’t mattered?

Matt Eckert 10:53
Well, I think at the beginning, moving into the drought, we we Plozza ploughed a new block, we purchased another farm, just adjoining farm down the road, and it was full of couch and just a disaster, to be perfectly honest with you. And we thought me and Tim thought we’d have a swing, which we did. And we knew purchasing it, that the only way to make money off of this particular farm was to Plozza plough that there was no other alternative. No time machine would have gone through it. No ripping machine would have done it. It was solely it had to be a disc. Had to be deep, it had to invert. It was back with a plaza plough. So we put two Plaza ploughs onto it, and we ploughed at 800 hectares worth. It was, and I’d have to say it was, it looked like a disaster. It was drifting just blue and blue. It was all had sand hills and all sorts in it. So we had a land plane down there levelling it in. And I remember one of the one of the guys we had driving one of our ploughs, he said to me and Tim, he said, Yeah, your boys are in way too deep. They’re in way too deep. We’re ploughing down there in February, and it’s 3840 degrees, and it’s just a disaster. And we’re like, no, no. We’ve done all these trials, and we’ve been doing it for a lot of years now, and we know it’s the only option. And I guess I remember saying to him, I said, the only thing that will bugger us up is if we get a millennial drought. Well, we ploughed it, we swifted it three times, and we had it beautiful, and it wouldn’t rain, and it wouldn’t rain, and we we got 14 mil of rain. So we went down and we sowed it, and then we had the 14 mil of rain on top of it. It come up, and it looked brilliant all year, but the dryer took its toll. In the end, we ended up reaping 700 tonne of grain off of that block, which we thought was, I think that’s that nearly about 800 tonne off of the block, and seven or 800 tonne, which, considering we’re in the millennial drought. Oh, I think was a pretty good result. Hadn’t ploughed that hadn’t the soil ameliorated, it hadn’t put any of that working, we would have wrecked absolutely nothing without a shadow of doubt. So I guess you could say yes, we still lost money. We didn’t make much of it. Well, we didn’t make any of a profit out of it. But of it, but we still produced 800 tonnes of barley, and we have a clean block we’re down there sowing canola right now. We sort of had most of it in before this eight mm rain fell, so we’re on the front foot now. So getting back to your question there, Jon like at the end of the day, no Plozza ploughing, no result, absolute no brainer. Couldn’t recommend it enough. We knew that when we were doing it, and I’m just so glad we tackled the whole thing when we did so…

Jon Paul Driver 13:52
Okay, take me through some of your management strategies in this drought. What are you doing different? What I hear you telling me is that you’ve prepared well for it. But what decisions are you making day to day, those tactical decisions in cropping or sowing, where you’re at? Is it sowing, seeding, planting…

Matt Eckert 14:15
I was seeding at the moment.

Jon Paul Driver 14:16
Okay, you use seeding. Okay, as you’re seeding, or as you’re managing your livestock in this terrible drought. What are you doing differently?

Matt Eckert 14:24
And so I guess, with these tough times, we’ve, you know, implemented a lot of what we’ve learned over the past, and dry seeding practices are obviously a are an outstanding way to sort of get off on the front foot quick when it does rain. So we’ve implemented a bit of dry seeding and stuff like that. We have some other issues though, that have, I guess, come to the surface. Normally, I would be a pretty confident dry seeding sort of character, like, you know, the more in the better. Really, it’s a numbers game. But to this year’s obviously, present. Did a few extra challenges that have made us maybe second guess our decisions. But one of them is, like on our bean stubbles, we obviously use reflex on our beans, and obviously the plant back there is, you know, you need quite a substantial amount of rain, and we’ve grazed our stubbles pretty hardly throughout this dry time, trying to keep the sheep off of our sandy soils. So we’ve lost our stubble retention. So, you know, there’s an issue there with drift and stuff. So we’re going to slow canola on those beans with that reflex. Now that sort of us a big move, really, according to the label. But I mean, at the end of the day, it will work. We’ve done trials, but it won’t work if we have that, if the furrow is filling with contaminated soil. So we have to be extremely careful when we dry seed that, and that’s why I’ve waited for a little bit of rain.

Jon Paul Driver 15:58
So what you’re talking about, just to make sure that I understand perfectly, is the herbicide residuals in the soil that normally would not be a problem because a normal rainfall would allow the biological activity to metabolise those herbicides, or to move that herbicide a little farther down into the soil profile where it’s not as harmful, or combination of both, right?

Matt Eckert 16:22
Exactly, Jon and, and that’s why we don’t want that sand drifting into our furrows on top of our canola seed. So just, just wait on it. We’ll probably take a little bit of a yield penalty because of that, maybe not being in quick but at the end of the day, I would rather good germination rate and no reflex damage, if we can avoid that. So we’ve sort of held back on the reins a little bit there. We’ve been down to sow anything that’s been soil ameliorated. We’ve certainly dry seeded all of our oats and rolled them all down. They’re all they’re all ready to go. So yeah, we onto our canola. Now have most of our canola in by the end of the week, and then it’ll be on to our cereals, our wheat and barley. So yeah, it’s other thing we know in this over sowing our lucid pastures. We just waited for rain to start with that, and so we’ve got the second seed of doing that at the moment, and so we’ll get through it pretty quick. Within two weeks, we’ll be shutting the book on our seeding program pretty well.

Jon Paul Driver 17:21
It’s so fascinating to me because we’ve just finished seeding. Truthfully, I have just a little bit of lucerne left to seed. The timing that we’re on opposite sides of the world, opposite seasons, and sowing at almost the exact same time is fascinating to me. And you’re a little delayed, right?

Matt Eckert 17:39
Yeah, I would say we’re delayed optimum time for us. I mean, we love to be sort of starting around that Anzac Day is, traditionally, is just a really nice time to start, I believe. And so, yeah, we’re little bit behind schedule, but I’m not too concerned, John. I haven’t changed the program too much. I’ve just made some strategic moves, like we’re saying about the herbicide issues, things like that. Our biggest, you know, our cropping enterprise is probably the least of my worries, actually, Jon, it’s, you know, when it rains, it’ll be okay. Things will recover. We’ve got things pretty set up pretty well. We’ve got good systems in place, good seeding principles and all of that sort of stuff. It’s just the livestock side is what’s really challenged us over the last sort of, well, basically two years now, definitely the last 18 months, and certainly the last sort of, you know, four to five months. It’s that’s where a lot of our We’ve implemented a lot of different strategies to to sort of get through those tough times with them. We’re currently naming confinement, which is, you know, it’s been, I mean, it hasn’t been a disaster. By no means. It’s working quite well. I mean, we’re basically down to no other options, but we, yeah, we had to build 12 pens and lock all of our ewes in there, which they’re currently lambing in. So that’s been a huge strategy that we’ve implemented to get through the dryer feed lot and all of our lambs. So got them in the got lambs in the feed lot. We got all our ewes in our confinement, I should say confinement paddocks. They’re not such pens. They’re sort of four to eight hectare paddocks. We’re feeding them every day in those pens. And yeah, they’re learning, well, they’re going very well actually being something that’s very, been very challenging for my dad. He’s sort of the livestock man. It’s what he that’s what he invests all of his time into. And yes, it’s certainly tested him. That’s for sure.

Jon Paul Driver 19:46
Okay, I worked for an agricultural lender, a bank that just lends to farmers. And in Montana, no doubt everybody’s heard of Montana, at least it’s our big country, and there’s definitely more cows than people, and in my time there, they had a reasonably bad drought. And the make or break for those livestock operations during that drought was If grandpa was still alive. And the reason that mattered is that grandpa had been through several droughts. Montana is fairly droughty, not always, but it certainly can be, and it’s very common to drive through Montana and see maybe two or three years worth of feed inventory, hay stored as round bales. Their hay storage practices are abysmal. I hope nobody from Montana is taking this too hard, but they had a lot of inventory to manage through droughts, and then if Grandpa was gone, the wisdom was gone, was the implication there, and it was just the young guys that were trying to run thin and hard and fast, they didn’t carry near as much feed inventory. Is that going to change for you now?

Matt Eckert 21:00
Jon, I would say not, no. I mean, we run a huge inventory of feed. We have, you know, grain storage on the site, nothing to hold, sort of four or 5000 tonne of grain. We’ve got hay sheds. So we’ve had a lot of fodder up our sleeves. And I genuinely thought, Jon, we would be right. It went beyond the capacity of what we had. But we bought early. We got some extra loads in early, which has helped, and thank God we did, because all the hay and fodder is absolutely depleted throughout our state. Now there’s nothing available. We’ve actually depleted sort of nearly New South Wales and Victoria also. So we’re pretty fortunate to have carried the backlog of fodder on our own farm. It’s certainly pulled us through, but I don’t think there’s any point having any more. We’ve moved past that economical feeding point now, and we’ve cut back a lot of livestock. Don’t get me wrong, we’re back probably 30, 35% on our breeders. We’ve offloaded anything that’s obviously not viable to carry. That all happened very quickly. I remember my dad saying to me, he’s like, That’s it, boys, that’s as low as I go. We’ll feed our way out of it. It was a it was an optimistic approach, and we nearly haven’t fed our way out of it. Jon, we’ve just had enough to get through. So call it good management. Call it good luck. Call it what you want. But we’ve been very fortunate to have the amount of solder we have had. And yeah, just very lucky.

Jon Paul Driver 22:38
I’ve heard those stories. Any of the livestock that’s knock kneed, cross eyed, looks at you funny, takes a run at you unnecessarily. All of those are the first ones to go in a drought.

Matt Eckert 22:49
Definitely, you just gotta, you really have to prioritise and just anything that’s not up to scratch or viable to keep, it’s just gotta go, and it’s gotta happen quick. You only want to be feeding higher value animals or prime breeding stock at that don’t need any more than you need sort of things so.

Jon Paul Driver 23:06
And then the next, the next cut on that is young. Stock stays old stock goes. I mean, you just start working through the list of priorities and hierarchy, right?

Matt Eckert 23:18
Yeah, you do. And you just, you just make small changes along the way, and you might offload a load here, and then, you know, go a little bit longer and offload another load. Try and stretch it out. You can’t make a radical decisions, you know, but we are just very lucky that we have the capacity in our fodder storage that we’ve got Jon like, you know, most people around here don’t have that, and it has certainly hurt people. That’s for sure. Cost of fodder is just horrendous at the moment, and hopefully this rain just keeps on giving a little bit and we see some release.

Jon Paul Driver 23:53
Out of curiosity, if you absolutely had to have a load of oaten hay today, what would it cost per tonne?

Matt Eckert 24:00
Well, it’s tough. Depends where it comes from. Obviously, Jon, freight is just huge. Yeah, nothing to blow 200 bucks a tonne, just on freight. But you know where there was hay coming out of New South Wales? You know, early on we were buying stuff around 260 to 280 freight. And back here, that was pretty good going. But basically, most people up around $400 a tonne now for hay, and you put the freight onto that back here landed. You’re talking 600 to 650 a tonne, and that certainly hurts. I mean, the dairy guys and that they would be paying that. But you know, as a sheep producer, it’s just well beyond the economics of return.

Jon Paul Driver 24:44
You have to have a really long term vision to hay at that price.

Matt Eckert 24:49
You do, and you have to determine very quickly what game you’re playing. Are you playing the short term reward game, where you’re playing the long game? We always say here we play the long game every day here, so we overlook a little bit of that stuff, you know, hoping that it’ll be all right in the long term, but it doesn’t want to go on any longer. That’s for sure, Jon.

Jon Paul Driver 25:10
A big thanks to our guest today for sharing valuable insights. This podcast is proudly presented by Feed Central and LocalAg, stay tuned for upcoming episodes.