BCG Farm in focus - Hugh Keam
- By: "Farm Tender" News
- US & World News
- Aug 02, 2018
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Hugh Keam takes a long term and methodical approach to farming. The qualified mechanical engineer uses recording, identifying trends and a range of tools available to make decisions.
Farming Name: HA & ML Keam
Hugh farms with his wife Merrily and parents Neville and Margaret. Hugh and Merrily have four children, Josiah, 14, Levi, 12, Seth, 9 and Eljah, 7.
Farm Location: Lah
Enterprises: Cropping: wheat, barley, vetch, canola and pulses. Livestock: 300 merino ewes and white Suffolk rams for the fat lamb market.
How much rain have you had this year?
We received 9 mm from January to April, then 86 mm in the growing season so far.
How is this influencing your decision making and what tools do you use inform those decisions?
A lot of my decisions around inputs are based on the fact: moisture is the one thing we can’t add.
We had about 82 mm summer rainfall (mainly in November and December), but I think that moisture is about 400 to 500 mm down the profile.
I like working with the French and Schultz equation, sometimes making modifications to it to suit my requirements. We have 40 years of rainfall numbers thanks to Dad and our neighbour, plus a lot of historical yield data. I use this information to make calculations on estimated yield.
Sometimes we’ve made the tough decision to cut crops for hay based on these calculations. This year I’ve bought some urea and we’ve put a bit out, but I’m cautious about how much I’ll put out.
Each year, I soil test (0-10cm) on all planned cereal paddocks with one deep N test per previous year crop type. This gives me enough idea on nutrition trends.
When spreading urea, I’ll often put in test strips to see if I’ve got the nitrogen rate right. I usually have a double rate and an ‘untreated’ strip. This serves as a good visual test throughout the year but the main results are in the yield. The hardest thing is making the time to go back and analyse yield maps.
The last few weeks have been challenging with frost, wind, warm and cold days. Has this impacted on your farming operations?
It’s been extremely difficult to get spraying done. If we didn’t have frost, we had wind so we’ve just had to modify some of our ideal spray condition requirements like spraying later in the afternoon.
Sheep are still a challenge too because we’re still feeding them.
What tools do you use to monitor the weather?
One of Agriculture Victoria’s soil moisture monitoring probe is on our farm (Brim) so I use this to keep an eye on what soil moisture is doing.
I follow Dale Grey’s The Fast Break with a lot of interest (I love his videos), the Bureau of Meteorology’s “Water and the Land” and the Norwegian Government weather site plus Elders weather too. I find these tools help validate my decisions and they are generally fast and reliable (if any weather forecast can be reliable).
How is the season looking?
I am becoming extremely nervous about the cropping outlook. I’m expecting maybe 1.5 to 2t/ha for the wheat and 2-2.5t/ha for barley. It could be worse if we get an extremely dry spring. I think our no-till, retained stubble system is helping maximise our crop’s chances this year.
It’s interesting that crops growing in the header trails from last year are looking more vigorous than the rest of the crops. The spreader set up on my header is pretty good I thought, but the slight increase in groundcover from the chaff is showing up in a dry season.
When did you come home to the farm and what did you do prior to this?
I’ve been home since 2006. I grew up in Warracknabeal and Dad travelled out to the farm each day. Now we live on the farm and my kids do the reverse of what Dad did.
I worked in the automotive industry for nine and a half years at Tickford Engineering Australia. It could be considered every young boy’s dream job driving and testing fast cars, but I was more interested in tractors and trucks and was happy to eventually come home and be a farmer.
After finishing at Tickford and prior to coming back to Lah, Merrily and I worked in Central Africa (Zambia) for a mission organisation MMM. Merrily worked as an accountant and helped provide vocational training in carpentry and bricklaying as well as general site maintenance.
It was an incredible experience. The farming systems in Zambia are based on cheap labour and small machinery (lots on the bigger farms). We came home to the farm at the end of the millennium drought and our experiences in Africa really put those challenges into perspective.
Picture - Hugh with children Josiah, 14, Levi, 12, Seth, 9 and Eljah, 7
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