Australasian Agribusiness Review - Vol

Crop farming systems in the Wimmera and Mallee region of Victoria are diverse. The environmental and economic conditions that prevail demand that farmers make constant changes and improvements to their farming systems. In this research the performances of four representative farming systems, designated ‘Reduced Till’, ‘Hungry Sheep’, ‘Fuel Burners’ and ‘No Till’, were examined and evaluated using economic and technical criteria. Activity gross margins were produced and a number of sustainability measures recorded and examined over number of trial ‘paddocks’ over a period of six years from 2000 to 2005. The results of the study indicate that three of the systems Reduced Till, Hungry Sheep and Fuel Burners over a 6 year period of low average annual rainfall, made similar contributions to profit when looked at across all paddocks and over time. The No Till system trailed the field. Reduced Till, Hungry Sheep and Fuel Burners had comparable economic performances. Reduced Till had a mean economic performance similar to Fuel Burner and Hungry Sheep, though his system also had a greater ’down-side’ risk, with paddocks that lost the largest amounts of money in some years. Conversely, paddocks under the Fuel Burner and Hungry Sheep systems produced the lowest losses in the poor years and, significantly, achieved the highest gross margins by a considerable margin in the good years. Fuel Burner was the least volatile system, closely followed by Hungry Sheep. Hungry Sheep and Fuel Burners had the lowest ‘poor’ economic performances and the highest ‘good’ economic performances. The similarity of economic performance over the run of years means that definitive conclusions about which is the best system for particular farms in the region must, as ever, be made on a case-by-case basis. The economic information forms part of the information that goes into decisions about which system to adopt. The lack of clear economic differentiation between the performance of systems may be, in part, a result of the poor climatic conditions experienced at the site over the term of the trial. Results from the trial over a few good years would be instructive too. There was little difference between each of the systems in terms of resource sustainability. However, Hungry Sheep and Fuel Burners systems were burdened with a high level of wind erosion risk in the summers of 2002-03 and 2004-05, whereas the Reduced Till and No Till activity sequences experienced only low levels of wind erosion. The climatic and soil conditions prevailing at the site over the term of the trial made it difficult to draw strong conclusions. The results provide information to farmers about the possible implications of using each of these cropping systems in the region over an extended period of low rainfall – something that may become more common in the medium term future than in the past half century.