TANTANOOLA'S Greg Altschwager is not afraid to do things differently on the family's cropping and sheep property, and it is an approach being embraced wholeheartedly by his son Jack.
Located on productive loams in the high-rainfall South East, the father and son chuckled in agreement saying they shore at different times to the region's norm, lambed at different times and cropped differently.
The Altschwagers crop 400 hectares consisting of hyper-yielding wheat, broad beans and canola, while running 3500 Merino and Multimeat-Merino ewes for flock ewe and lamb production.
Never afraid to try something new, the Altschwagers were among the first to trial industrial hemp but have put that aside for the time being to focus on growing hyper-yielding wheat.
While many in the region are growing the crops with good success, the Altschwager family are doing it with as little fungicide use as possible.
Greg said he believed that if a grower looked after their soils, the soils would look after them.
"We try and use as little fungicide as possible," Jack said.
"Dad's a believer that if you can't grow a crop without fungicide then you probably shouldn't be growing a crop in the first place.
"The last couple of years we've had to do one spray, but there's others out there that may be doing two or three sprays just as a precautionary measure (on wheat)."
Greg said plenty of bean crops in the region would receive up to five fungicide sprays in a season, but they would only put on one and only if desperately needed.
"You'll always have some ascochyta blight and chocolate spot there but if it's not on the new leaf - just on the old leaf dying off when it's more prone to disease - we won't worry about a spray," he said.
Jack said they felt like they were breeding out any resistance to fungicide each year and getting less reliant on it because plants were building up disease resistance as a consequence.
"In the past five years we might have done one fungicide spray on beans and we've only done two on wheat in that same time," he said.
"We're not putting those fungicides on but still getting the yields we're chasing.
"If we can breed out that need to use fungicides then we're better off.
"It's one less pass on the sprayer we need to do, less diesel, less maintenance."
The Altschwagers have been growing white feed wheat variety Manning for several years.
They have been averaging between seven tonnes/ha and 8t/ha.
This season, they added the new red feed wheat Accroc into the mix for the first time and said their better paddocks averaged up to 10t/ha, with the yield monitor on the header reaching 16t/ha in some patches.
A massive windstorm flattened some paddocks of the new variety, but the Altschwagers still managed to get 5t/ha off those.
"We sowed it in mid-April, grazed it early to get a reduction in growth because it can have a tendency to lodge when it's filling," Jack said.
"It's got potential but we might have to hit it with a growth regulator next year.
"We'll also have to keep soil testing and monitoring trace elements because we're not entirely sure of what the long-term effects of growing a 10t/ha wheat crop are.
"We generally put beans in straight after the wheat so that will fix nitrogen and help."
Another issue the Alschwagers have to be wary of cropping in a high-rainfall region is waterlogging.
Jack said they spent a fair bit of time in previous years digging drains to get water off paddocks.
"The biggest limiter with our yields is waterlogging," he said.
"If we can get crops in early and get plants up above the water levels for most of winter we're doing alright but that's not the case sometimes."
CROPPING PROGRAM BENEFITS LIVESTOCK
As well as trying new varieties and new crops, the Altschwager family at Tantanoola ensure the cropping side of their enterprise complements the livestock side as much as possible.
Jack said the stubbles of their beans, which achieved 3.5t/ha this season, are used to fatten lambs, while ewes are put onto wheat stubbles to rest pastures.
The family also use 120ha of irrigation to fatten lambs and this was where their first crop of industrial hemp was grown.
"It was a reasonably easy crop to grow in terms of fertiliser application and so on," Jack said.
"When it got in and got going, the weeds would be overtaken by the density of the hemp crop so you wouldn't have to use a herbicide for weeds.
"It didn't yield as well as what we thought but we put that down to having too high a density.
"Whether it's an option for the future or not, at least we've had a crack at it."
While hemp has been put on the backburner, in the Altschwager spirit they will trial 10ha of new hyper-yielding wheat Annapurna this year.
"I reckon if you're not looking to move forward, you're moving backwards," Jack said.
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