Wayne Smith
Agronomic Acumen
PO Box 831
ALBANY 6331
Western Australia
wsmith@agronomy.com.au
www.agronomy.com.au
From mid 2008, there will also be the website in conjunction with Matt Hagny
called Learning Plant Language at www.learningplantlanguage.com.
Achieving the Impossible
TS Eliot wrote: Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find how far
one can go.
Let’s chew the cud for a bit. So here you are in Kansas, farming, growing
crops and running a few cattle. Your yields are about average, and you run
as many cattle as all your neighbours. It was this way for your father, and his
father, and his father. Perhaps you think this is the way it is and the way it will
always be, but with better machinery☺.
Perhaps you received rainfall of 25” for the year. A good year. Your wheat
averaged 40 b/ac at $8/bushel. Life is good. You run one cow and calf per 6
acres, which is better than your neighbours. You spend nothing on your
pastures and cattle prices are good and you made a reasonable profit on your
cattle as well as your crops. It was a good year.
How good would it have been if you had averaged 100 b/ac wheat, and
carried 1 cow and calf on every acre of pasture?
That’s impossible you say?
What if it isn’t though? What if it really was possible, and it didn’t cost much to
achieve it? What if you even needed less hay and time with the cows than
you do now, but have 1,000 cows + 1,000 calves on your 1,000 acres of
pasture?
In my 22 years experience in agriculture, I have found that excuses, “yeah
buts…”, are a major stumbling block to farmers achieving substantially higher
profits. The obvious question is, “if it was possible to average 120 b/ac wheat
in Kansas, and 1 cow and calf per acre on the pastures, why hasn’t anyone
done it yet?”
It is a good and valid question. By the way, the potential is even higher than
that☺.
Why is the average Kansas farmer performing so far below what is possible?
From someone who has spent his agricultural life helping farmers achieve
what was considered impossible, and from someone looking in from the
outside, Kansas farmers have missed the boat. I believe the reason is you
have not asked the right questions. You did not have enough curiosity. You
did not ask what was possible.
I hope at this conference I can be a small part of encouraging you to achieve
more, more efficiently, at substantially higher profits, and enjoy farming even
more.
My presentation is, hopefully, going to make you think, and help you to ask
the right questions. I hope I can help you see what things need to change in
your farming system, and that you can put pressure on your researchers to
get ahead of you and find the answers you need. I will be showing you some
of the reasons that I see as why the average Kansas farmer is not achieving
“amazing” yields, cattle production and profits.
You should be, and can be, some of the most efficient and profitable farmers
in the world.
I hope you can be excited with the future of agriculture. I sure am.
Some of the take home points from the presentation are:
- Lack of rainfall is not the main problem yet to higher profits. More and
better timing of rainfall will not help you, yet☺, as much as other
factors.
- >100 b/ac wheat averages in Kansas should be common, not rare or
extinct.
- 1 cow and calf per acre is easily achievable, with less hay than is
currently used.
- Nutrition starts with trace elements, not nitrogen or phosphate. Let the
plant do the talking.
- Frost and freeze tolerant wheats are coming.
- Drought tolerant wheat is already here (eg 45 b/ac on 5.2” of rain).
- No-till with maximum stubble retention and crop diversity is essential.
- There is enormous upside to what you should be achieving.
- Your researchers need to be fine tuning why crop yields and pasture
production and utilisation are not near the potential.