Episode 2: Weeding out a future on the land – with Andrew Somervaille

At Behind the Seed Podcast, we explore the changing ways we feed the world. We talk tech, research and how it will affect paddocks near you. I'm Bridget Smith, a former rural journalist and your host. It's not just an aesthetic. It's a financial imperative to take control of weeds in the farming system. It's not only with crop production but in animal production as well. For weeds, it imposes great cost to the industry. It's not only in loss production but in the cost of actually dealing with the control. From growing up in the northern suburbs of Sydney to a lifelong career helping growers battle weeds on their farms. It's an unlikely tale of life on the land for Andrew Somervale and agricultural consultant for Jubilee Consulting. 40 years on and he is still in the weed control business and couldn't think of life anywhere else. Weed control has changed dramatically over the years and Andrew has had a front row seat in seeing it evolve. From drone technology to the development of herbicide tolerant sorghum crops. It's just the beginning for an industry that has become innovative and adaptable. The younger generation is bringing a lot to the industry too. A largely tertiary educated farmer, Andrew Somervale says they are full with thinking with identifying problems and looking for solutions. A prospect he finds exciting to work with. So Andrew, how does a boy from the northern suburbs of Sydney end up spending his life on the land? Well, it probably started in my very early years spending time on my uncle's property at New Naramine and New South Wales and taking a liking to the open air and the cropping and animal production that was going on there and so it was a natural extension having spent quite a few school holidays out in that region to want to have a life's work that involved agriculture. So what did your family think when you packed up and moved to the country for university? I was a bit of the odd person out really in the family because most of my other siblings, in fact all of them stayed in the city and certainly my parents did too. So I was the one sent out to the frontier, I guess, and I represented the family in that way. So whereabouts did you decide to do university and what did you study? Well, I went to the University of New England in Armadale and the main reason for going there at the time was that it was out of the city. So that was a very important draw card. The other thing about the course which was a Bachelor of Rural Science was that it was one that covered all agricultural disciplines and it met at the time that I wasn't required to specialise in any one particular area and in that way I felt that would be more flexible at the end when I completed their studies to enter into whatever form of agriculture that was presented to me at the time. So Andrew, how did you come to work then in the weed control area? Well, it was bit by accident really because my final year project was in the area of cattle production and I was much more interested in that at the time. But in 1979 there were very few opportunities for people with tertiary qualifications to enter into the animal industries and that would have been mostly in the Department of Agriculture, CSORO, etc. So really I took the first job that was offered to me which was with a multinational chemical company in December of 1979 thinking that might be an interim activity for two or three years and I would move on from there. But as it turns out I was there for 18 and a half years and had a great liking for working with plants and crops in a diverse agricultural systems. How important is weed control in the business of farming? It's not just an aesthetic, it's a financial imperative to take control of weeds in the farming systems not only with crop production but in animal production as well. For weeds do impose great cost to the industries not only in loss production but in the cost of actually dealing with the control of those weeds and also in some cases the contamination that takes place as far as the weeds are concerned. Do farmers value the importance of weed control? Well I think so because not only has got an economic bottom line but for many farmers of course the appearance of weeds on their property is something that reflects on their management and so I think there is a certain amount of pride associated with maintaining a farm with good weed control and so there's not only just the economic side of things but also the reflection on the overall farm's ability to manage his property. How has farmers focus on weed control changed over the 40 years you've been in the industry? Well it's changed greatly in sophistication, I can still remember going on to a farm south west of Naramine in 1980 and farmer breathlessly telling me about how this new product that he'd been using for the first time had done wonderful things in his wheat crop and he was talking about 2-4D. So I know he wasn't one of the early adopters in that time in 1980 in the central west New South Wales it was probably only 3 or 4 herbicide products that were available and used on a regular basis. At that stage the glyphosate product round up at the time was just being used for the first time by broad acre farmers. And then of course there's been a plethora of products being used and even now with the maturity in the number of products that have been brought to the market there's been a reuse and repositioning of some of the older products and they've been used again in a different format now in 2019 to what they were originally used. What difference can weed control make to the productivity of a farm? Ultimately it means that the less weeds that are grown the more water and nutrients are available to a crop or a pasture as it may be. And so by maintaining good weed control it provides not only those opportunities to crop but provides greater flexibility. There are many weeds that when they reach a certain density or infestation on a farm really preclude the choice of certain crops. And so if for example you have feather top roads grass that becoming very prolific on a particular field or crop landscape there are some crops that it's just not wise to use in that setting. So by controlling some of these important weeds it does give you a lot more choices as to what crops you might be able to grow on a particular paddy. Going back historically have the different generations perceived weed control differently? I think so because one of the things and it's still sometimes a factor now is that weeds that are visible from the road receive a greater attention than those ones that may be hidden in a crop. For example there's a greater version to people having turnip weed which has a bright yellow flower. And you can have farmers who are become obsessed I guess over a small number of yellow flower sticking above a crop whereas in reality there are problems that are much more serious to their crop productivity that might be present that aren't visible. So there's still that aspect of weeds having a acidic effect on their crop or their farm I should say rather than those that might be more important to productivity. And I think there is a much greater realisation that just because you can see something from a distance doesn't mean it's a problem and conversely a weed that you can't see from a distance can be much more of a problem. So I think people are much more analytical and observant of things that are actually a threat to their productivity. Is it a fine line I guess to draw when it becomes a threat to productivity? How do they know when there's too much or.? Well I think often times it's when the header goes into the paddock and they come across an area where there's very little crop in an area or very thin crop and the bog start turning and people start asking well why is this so? And that's often unfortunately the first time people start to realise that they have a serious problem. The other time might be when they're trying to either spray or cultivate a field and find that after they've finished that operation there's areas that still remain green or there are weeds that remain uncontrolled and there's a very visual cue as to things they need to put into place to try and avoid that problem in the future. Behind the seed podcast is proudly brought to you by Pacific Seeds breeding, producing and supplying leading broad-acre seed solutions. Andrew, to understand weed control it's always good to look at its history. Sorgham only started being grown on a broad scale in the 1970s. How did farmers implement weed control during this time? Some of it was a little before my time but a lot of it would have relied on products such as 2.4D and in the early days, toward 50D as it would have been then. And of course into row cultivation for those who are row-croppers. I think it's fair to say however there were probably some weeds that weren't as serious a problem as they are now present such as the grasses. There was the introduction of atrazine that certainly did help grass weed control at that early stage of the production system. But those weeds have become more problematic than some of the old weeds like birds and thorn apple which were probably the main things that people were concerned about in the early days of Sorgham production at least in Southern Queensland. In the 1980s it proved to be quite progressive with weed control with the development of dual which was pretty good. emergency herbicide, how did it change the game? Well, for starters, people were finding at that early stage that grass weed control wasn't being reliably provided by Atrazine applied pre-emergence, so dual was a great tool to be introduced at the time. It gave another mode of action, not that the people were concerned about that at the time. They were more concerned about the lack of control being provided by their existing weed control measures. Well, what's some of the biggest threats that graingrows face in regards to weeds? Well, I think graingrows have a variety of threats, but in my opinion, I think grasses are the things that test us most because being similar to the crop, if we're talking about cereal crops, we've got a rather smaller number of options to provide selective control, at least in our cereal crops. So, with the onset of weed resistance, more so in weed crops and summer crops, we've found ourselves reliant on a shrinking number of herbicides for grass weed control. That's not to diminish the importance of broadleaf weeds, but in fairness, we have a much greater range of broadleaf weed, selective herbicides available to us. As we know, technology has changed farming systems, what's been the biggest change that you've seen? One of the biggest changes I've seen is the spray distribution or application area. Back in 1980, there were mostly fairly rudimentary sprayers available, and I can remember going onto some farms where nozzles were welded into the homemade galvanised pipe. We'd have burnt widths of 12 or maybe even 15 metres being the norm, with today's self-pelt sprayers, with vastly increased capacity to spray large areas in short periods of time. We've seen the aspect of timeliness being much more easily dealt with than it would have been in the past where you had maybe a ground room sprayer having a capability of maybe 40 or 50 acres an hour if you're lucky to one hour where you can look well in excess of 150 hectares in a morning, maybe more. Tracking of sprayers, we very much relied on manual systems for tracking sprayers, whether it was through a disk or a flame marker to one which relies on electronics and GPS and self-steering of self-propelled sprayers having a vast impact on the efficiency and accuracy of spray applications these days. You can put on top of that spray controllers, the controllers that regulate the flow to different nozzles. Diversity of nozzles available now that deliver a range of spray characteristics that are suitable for the situation at hand. Put all those things together and you've had a vast difference, a vast change in the capability of people to apply pesticides in a very efficient way in 2019. How has it improved the accuracy? Well very much so, in the old days of course where people even judged swath matching by eye and they relied either on a flame marker or in some cases a guesswork, wasn't uncommon to have overlaps of 5 to 10% especially in irregularly shaped fields and now we've got 2.5 centimetre accuracy GPS so that allows exact swath matching and not only that where you do get irregular field shapes you can have swath control that allows spray equipment to be switched off and when you do get into overlap areas which otherwise would have been over over sprayed maybe twice even three times in a traditional system which relied on visual aids only. Pacific seeds has developed a seed that is tolerant to herbicides how will this change things for farmers? Well for starters it introduces another mode of action into the grain sorghum production system that hasn't been available presently and really when you think about it it's a mode of action that's really used in our summer production systems anyway because of the small number of crops that are tolerant to that mode of action that are growing in the summer production systems. In the first instance it provides an opportunity to use herbicides with the group B mode of action in sorghum and to provide control of otherwise uncontrollable weeds such as johnson grass in a sorghum but it also means that for people who have used the same mode of action in a fellow in the prior period leading up to sorghum they have some protection against carryover of herbicides that might have been used in a previous part of the production system and that's been a great burn for people in 2018-19 where certain herbicides were used in the fellow in 2017-18 the areas were not returned to winter crop and they were returned to summer crop and this technology allowed those people to plant sorghum with confidence knowing that the sorghum would not be adversely affected by herbicide carryovers. What does the future of weed control in sorghum look like? Well I think there are some other technologies that are around the corner that would enable the use of other modes of action of herbicides to be used in sorghum. At present we're really confined to probably two pre-emergent modes of action that's the group C or atrazine, turbothylazine and a group K which is dual or matoleclaw. With the Sentinel sorghum we have the use of some of the group B herbicides particularly Intervix as a post-emergence over the type of sorghum but some of the other technologies that are available and innovations that have been brought in by some of the seed companies will allow other herbicides to be utilised which are presently not suitable for use in sorghum. They might be suitable for use in corn and that's one of the things in Australia that we find ourselves in a fairly difficult situation because corn being such a large crop on a worldwide basis means that many herbicides that are developed for corn aren't suitable for sorghum but for us in Australia sorghum is a much more valuable summer cereal crop and for that reason we've been left up till now with a very small number of possibilities for selective pre-emergence control in those crops. Andrew just to wrap it up if you would look back on your career what has been the highlights for you? Well every year is different and I think and one of the things that really excites me I suppose is seeing the change in the farming landscape but increasingly now we see a younger generation and as you mentioned in the introduction that are mostly very often tertiary qualified and that's brought a curiosity if you like to the farming system that perhaps wasn't there when people relied on tradition very much and there's a lot of good traditions of course but there is a need to be always curious about the way things are being done at the present and looking for over the horizon for things that might be emerging and for dealing with existing problems as well and I see that readiness to embrace change as being one of the more exciting things in the highlight of my time having seen a transition from a very traditional based farming system based on inherited wisdom to one that is evidence based where people are looking out there anticipating problems and finding solutions to those problems. 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