My Farming
The biggest impediment to my farming career was I suffered from asthma from a very young age. The harvest dust was an ordeal for me and I did stick to farming for as long as I could but it was no fun at harvest time.
Apart from that I did love working with machinery especially earthmoving gear, trucks and I liked welding and building things.
The old farms were all fenced in small paddocks and as the tractors and machinery got bigger the paddock fences were pulled up until eventually there was only boundary fences left and sometimes even those were pulled down.
Traditionally sorghum was grown in summer time and wheat and barley in winter time and for a while early on linseed was a very profitable crop before acrylic paint was invented.
When I left school there was overproduction of grain and it was not worth very much at all. We had quotas to deliver to the Wheat Board silos in town and made life very hard financially for grain growers.
Because of this a lot of farmers started growing cotton in the 1980s and this was the bad old days when it involved daily spraying with aircraft and insecticides.
None the less it was a real boost for the economy in the cotton growing areas and in the 1990s when Monsanto introduced genetically modified cotton that had an enzyme that killed heliothids grubs it changed the concept of cotton growing worldwide.
The fact that this system developed by Monsanto is still going strong now after 30 years is one of the greatest achievements in agriculture but seldom recognised it seems.
I had a neighbour who was allergic to all chemicals and I felt obliged not to grow cotton while he was there, however in 1989 two things happened, he left the district and in a very tough year I managed to grow a crop of wheat that went one ton to the acre when harvested.
The wheat board paid me $87.00 a ton for that crop which worked out about $50.00 per acre below the cost of production.
That did it for me and in 1990 I planted my first crop of cotton.
It was a very dry spring and I eventually planted in late November, well after the recommended cut off planting date for the crop.
I made it through the season somehow even with all the poor advice from cotton agronomists and many other problems.
I had asked another farmer at Brookstead if he would pick my cotton for me, and he said he would be delighted and it would cost $100.00 an acre for him to do so.
I did not think about that for long when I started making enquiries about second hand cotton pickers and ended up buying 3 pickers which was good because 2 of them where always broken down.
I thought I could fix anything but my enthusiasm was wearing a bit thin by the end of that first cotton season.
The pickers were one thing but I also needed a module builder to make the picked cotton into modules to be delivered to the cotton gin at Cecil Plains.
I exhausted all options to buy a second hand one and said that is no problem I will build one.
I ended up finding an engineering works at Montville of all places, owned by Jim Hooper a most interesting gentleman.
He had built some of the very first module builders years before and I got word of this and rang him up. Jim left school in Scotland at the age of 10 and made it to Australia somehow.
He was a natural hard worker and problem solver and had a reputation for getting jobs completed that nobody else could. His huge shed at Montville had a dirt floor and some of the most massive machinery and tools that I had ever seen.
I was like a schoolboy in a lolly shop as he showed me giant presses and metal cutting guillotines, he had made with hydraulic rams that he made himself from submarine oxygen tanks that he had picked up at the naval dockyards for peanuts.
These oxy tanks were about 700 mm diameter with walls over 50 mm thick to handle the enormous pressures of compressed gas for the subs. Jim had these monstrous metal lathes and he would cut about a 2 metre length of oxy tank and machine it out perfectly and make these great big hydraulic rams out of them.
He hooked up big electric motors to equally big hydraulic pumps and boosted the lot to about 5,000 psi. He showed me men making ripper tynes for Caterpillar tractors and they would bend this steel which was about 300 mm x 150 mm into the shape for the rippers.
He also showed me how the lights in Montville went dull as they were making the bend.
Anyway, Jim cut out all my steel and supplied all my hydraulics to build the module builder.
I would start welding about 4 in the morning and finish about 8 pm at night and after a couple of weeks we had a working module builder.
I picked my own cotton then went to a neighbour’s place and picked another few hundred acres for him and that is how I jump started producing cotton.
17 years later when I picked my last crop we were still making refinements to that builder and it had been lengthened and heightened and fitted with a computer to stamp the cotton automatically.
I spent a lot of time and money trying for underground irrigation bores and eventually found a small supply in our South east corner that produced about 12,000 gallons per hour.
I had got an engineer to design an irrigation dam on the gully that ran through the property but I could not get any one to build it as all the earthworks people were booked out for years.
No worries I searched all over Australia and eventually found a Scraper that ticked the boxes for me.
It was cat 631c located way down in Victoria.
I also got my hands on a old Cat D7 17a bulldozer and was right in my element.
Over the next 6 or seven years I built 3 dams for myself and another 5 dams for friends and neighbours in all shifting about 3 million cubic metres off soil and making storage for about 2,000 megalitres of irrigation water.
One day we woke up to the news that Peter Beattie our Queensland Premier had announced the Water Allocation Management Plan and his greenie mates had convinced him to not allow any more water conservation on the Darling Downs.
As far as my observations go the gully that ran through my property would flood for a day or two every year on average and be bone dry the rest of the time.
By storing that water we had permanent water and the birds and frogs and plants and a complete ecosystem had a permanent home.
We never used all the water and that eco system survived sometimes years in between floods.
Also that generated jobs and economic advantages to a lot of people versus not building dams and the water would be lost down stream very quickly for no benefit to the economy or envioroment.
As I have said before, no farmer ever destroyed a drop of water, they merely re circulated it through plants and the benefits are enormous while meanwhile every drop of water that was on this earth still is.