FIFTEEN years after switching to organic broadacre practices, John and Jenny Schwarz, Taplan, are reaping the benefits.
Premium prices for their wheat and rye range anywhere between 50 per cent and 100pc higher than conventional crops.
And even in years of lower yield, profit margins are good enough to return the necessary income - without the costs incurred by chemicals.
John made the switch to organics on their 2393-hectare northern Mallee property after about 15 years of farming conventionally.
"In short, the process was all about getting rid of the chemicals we'd been using, as well as doing away with artificial fertilisers," he said.
"We trialed a few different things instead to see what might work for us, but we didn't have the success we thought we should.
"We came to a stage where we realised we might as well put the grain in the ground and leave it to the hands of the Creator.
"That's basically what we do today, although for the past five to six years we've been adding gypsum in some areas, and from time to time we add basalt sand."
Yields have varied from year-to-year, like any farm, as a result of the weather with "fairly ordinary" seasons from 2006 to 2009 returning 0.3 tonnes a hectare.
"This doesn't sound like a lot, but it's not as bad as it seems because we haven't got the expenses that conventional guys have," John said.
"Our profit margin during that time varied between $80 and $140/ha, so we weren't doing that bad.
"In 2010, we had an absolutely phenomenal year and reapt way beyond anything we'd grown on the farm before - averaging 1.8t/ha."
With a poor start the next year, yields were 0.4t/ha, and last season - another poor start - it rained on the last day of seeding, which resulted in strong weed competition.
"There wasn't anything we could do about that so we left it in God's hands and waited to see where it would take us," John said.
"We also had a big influx of kangaroos and goats that caused crop loss because we're right against the border and have Sunset National Park as an eastern boundary.
"The interesting thing is we still finished with a gross margin of $75/ha and I came away realising that, while we didn't get what we wanted, we got what we needed -and that's important."
John is particularly well-prepared for low-yielding years because he stores all his grain in on-farm silos.
"The on-farm storage gives us cashflow right through the year," he said.
"We sell to Laucke Flour Mills and they source it when they need it.
"We've got sealed silos and we use carbon dioxide to stop any weevil infestations, so we can store for the whole year or beyond if we need to, and that's happened already."
After good years in 2000 and 2001, drought in 2002 left the Schwarzs with no crop, but Laucke chose to have John store grain from the previous seasons, which he then supplied through 2002 and 2003.
"It's an advantage because it gives us a cashflow right through the year, and ours is a farmgate price," John said.
By far the best thing about organic farming for John is the lack of chemicals.
He realised how much the chemicals were affecting him once he was rid of them.
"Quite honestly, I think it's taken the stress out of farming for me," he said.
"Although there are still issues with spray drift, we've got really good neighbours who do their best to keep the chemicals from coming onto our property.
"But there are people further away who don't realise how far chemicals will drift and it doesn't just affect us, it affects the wider community.
"We often have people saying to us that chemicals are bad and it's giving them headaches and so on.
"People are not well and much of it seems to be from the chemicals."
John says one of the hard aspects of converting to organic broadacre is the limited assistance compared with what is available to conventional farmers.
"Mostly we do our own trials and work out our own way to overcome problems, whereas for conventional farmers there are often lots of dollar floating around to help them find answers," John said.
"I do tend to watch what's happening to collect a bit off the coat tails every now and then, particularly with grain varieties, which is good.
"So we do get some of the benefits indirectly. Probably one of the hardest parts is that there is not a big number of broadacre organic farmers. We tend to be on our own, which makes it a little bit more difficult.
"On the other hand, we've been getting some help from the Murray Mallee Local Action Planning Group to put in some oil mallee trees on a demonstration site."
*Full report in Stock Journal, June 6 issue, 2013.