OK, I think it's safe to say that this writeup is a little bit late! I have been trying to get the website to a stage where it's not such a hassle to write articles with lots of images, which is a good enough excuse(for me anyway) as to why I haven't done this write up sooner.  I've got things worker better now, so I thought I'd have a go at the much belated writeup.

The Spring Walk was held 23rd of September 2002 and as you might recall it was rather dry at the time. We started from Cyril Box Pavilion, piled on the bus and headed out to Stephen Bolts to look at his Barley Variety trial. Blakey Painter was the speaker and we looked at Striling, 2109, 2104(Hamelin), 2080 and Gardiner.

Stephen Bolt and Blakey Painter

Due to the dry season, not alot could be seen between the varieties but the harvest results here, were still interesting.

An unscheduled stop was at Anton McBeath's to see a demonstration of a ezee-on offset disc machine being used to green manure a paddock.

Interline Sales Demonstration

It certainly did an impressive job of incorporating the plant matter. Another option that can be considered to improve soil fertility.

In action

After the green manuring we moved onto the Canola trials at Neville Turners, with guest speaker Peter Nelsen. Peter gave us a good run down of the pros/cons of the various varieties and Neville smiled alot!(as you can see from the photo)

Neville Turner, Peter Nelsen & David Thomas

Just down from here was one of our pits that we dug as part of our subsoil investigation for our GRDC funded research project(CFG2). Guest speaker here was Prof. Bob Gilkes from UWA whom along with Josh Whitwell, has been investigating the limiting factors of the subsoil at each of our project sites.

Prof Bob getting his hands dirty

Our pits ranged from about 1.2m to 2m deep, depending on how hard the soil was to dig. The photo below shows a fairly deep sand

Prof Bob again

Josh Whitwell did his final year thesis on the subsoil constraints of these pits and makes for interesting(if somewhat technical) reading.

Next site was still in the canola, but on a very different soil. Here you can clearly see why those strainer post holes are always so hard to dig!

Josh Whitwell

The next pic shows the old root channels, now filled with sand, that are the only way our crops can get their roots down onto this hard zone

Old root channels

After the canola pits we moved onto one in a wheat crop. As you can see, this was so hard that we were only able to get down about 1.5m.

Prof Bob again

This site has had a strip ripped with a D7 dozer to a depth of approx 700mm to see the affect on root growth. The next 2 pics show the difference between the unripped and ripped areas

Not ripped - little root mass in lower profile

Ripped (to right of pic)

There seemed to be quite a difference in the amount of root growth in the ripped area. Although ripping with a dozer is not a practical approach for broadacre farming, it was done here to establish what the limiting factors were on yield.

left half ripped - right half not

Next stop was Wes Bakers for his lupin row spacing trial. Wes has seeded at 23cm, 46cm & 92cm spacings(9in, 18in, 36in) The next 3 pics are in that order

23cm(9 inch) spacing

46cm(18 inch) spacing

92cm(36 inch) spacing

Garren Knell(Consult Ag.) & Wes to the left, farmer rabble to the right!

Wes did comment that the seed coverage wasn't as good with the wider spacings, but he was hoping to be able to trial a shielded boom to spray the weeds in the inter-rows with a knockdown.

Next was the Bulyee hall for lunch and guest speakers. While we enjoyed our lunch we heard from;

John Blake & David Thomas

After lunch it was back to Wes Bakers to look at frosted wheat. This particular wheat crop was in very early and looked absolutely fantastic on our winter field walk. But unfortunately even this crop couldn't escape the crap year that last year was and got badly frosted.

Looks great, but...

Wes decided to cut some for hay and had it sold before we left the site! Garren Knell(Consult Ag) ran though some figures which showed cutting for hay gave a good economic return out of a bad situation.

100% frosted

The CVT trials were our next point of call, at Richards Guinness's.

CVT Trials

Peter Burgess (Agritech) & Fiona Martin were our speakers here. Again, due to the season, everything was suffering from lack of moisture, so it was hard to pick between them.

Fiona Martin & Peter Burgess

As we were leaving the site Greg Shea found strip rust in the trial. It was debated as to wether we should burn our clothes to prevent spreading the strip rust , or just burn Greg for finding it in the first place. As it started to drizzle it was decided to just keep going and have a beer when we got back instead.(Lucky Greg!)

Next was David Thomas's and his Casbah Biserrula pasture. Speaker was Neil Ballard from Ballard Seeds.

David & Neil

Considering the season so far, David had got a very good pasture establishment.

Good establishment.

And that was it! A very good day with around 60 people attending. The only thing left was the BAR-B-Q and beer, which was kindly provided by the AWB.

Food, Beer, they're happy!

A big thankyou to those that helped to organise the day, to the guest speakers that gave their time to come along, AWB for providing the Bar-B-Q and ofcourse to the farmers who came and made the all the effort worth while. See you all at the 2003 Winter Field Walk.

Thanks to all.