Bradley Millsteed (right) and his son Dylan at their Watheroo property in WA. For the Millsteeds, crop choice has become more opportunistic, with barley now playing a larger role in the search for a profitable rotation. Photos: Evan Collis

A decade ago, when Watheroo grower Bradley Millsteed took part in GroundCover’s annual grower series, he and members of the extended family were cropping 1625 ha. They produced wheat, barley, canola, lupins and wheaten hay.

They also ran a self-replacing Merino flock of 1700 ewes and 50 Poll Hereford breeders at their property, ‘Glenview’, midway between Perth and Geraldton.

Today, the farm business has shifted markedly as the climate has changed. The core of the Millsteed operation remains mixed farming, but the enterprise balance has changed.

The cattle were sold off in 2017 and sheep numbers have been halved – decisions driven by both environmental and business factors.

“It’s because of the changing climate as much as anything,” Bradley says. “With our mix of soil types, it started to cause a lot of erosion, so we needed to keep more stubble on the sand plains.”

Crop choices

Crop choice has become more opportunistic, with barley now playing a larger role in the search for a profitable rotation. Bradley says lupins, traditionally grown for both grain and sheep feed, have been a let-down in recent years.

“We’ve tried myriad different changes in terms of fertiliser and chemical regimes, and still haven’t really nailed it,” he says. “Being the eternal optimist farmer, I’m hoping that what we’ve done this year will be the difference, and we’ll be able to start growing them a bit more.

“We’ve done a trial of higher fertiliser rates to increase phosphorus levels, along with a post-sowing pre-emergent application of Brodal^®, which has been a huge winner in weed control.”

The Millsteeds haven’t grown canola at ‘Glenview’ since 2017, when they had to make the heartbreaking decision to spray out an unviable crop. Bradley says a failed canola crop was “just ridiculous”, considering the farm’s location 200 km north-east of Perth and just 100 km from the coast.

It also followed a run of devastating late frosts in 2016 when WA experienced its coldest September average minimum temperatures on record. The frost smashed crops across a broad sweep of the state’s wheatbelt, shaving an estimated 2 million tonnes of grain – valued at $600 million – off the harvest.

It was a bitter pill for grain growers like Bradley and led to the formation of the mental health advocacy program #6Bs.

Machinery upgrades allow dry sowing

Other changes since 2015 have included machinery upgrades:

• a Terraland Bednar TO 6000 deep ripper
• a Barnes Hydraulics ‘Grazzanator’ rubber roller
• a John Deere 9520R added to the tractor fleet
• a Simplicity 30 Series 14,000 L air seeder box/cart
• an Equalizer 15000 VX seeder bar (274 mm spacings).

This has helped with incorporating lime and potash into the soil profile, and enabled dry-sowing of up to half the crop in the past 2 years.

“The gear that we had 10 years ago couldn’t have done what we did dry this year, and all of that looks amazing right now after the break,” Bradley says.

“That’s been a big investment for us and we’re reaping rewards from it. We’ve also precision-mapped all of the paddocks so we can keep on top of chemical costs.”

The area under crop hasn’t changed. Soils are a patchwork of heavy blue clay, yellow sand plains and “tricky” non-wetting sands, although the long-term liming program has improved both soil pH and grain quality.

Dry challenges

Rainfall remains a defining challenge. However, new technology adoption has masked to some extent the seasonal variability as the longer-term rainfall trend declines.

The 2015 season was marked by early dry periods offset by bursts of heavy rain and “the driest September in recent history”.

At that time, Bradley said they had already become more reactive growers after the Millennium Drought of the early 2000s, playing seasonal conditions rather than blindly following a prescribed plan.

“As much as that decade hurt – mentally, emotionally and financially – I believe it has made us better growers,” he said at the time. It’s a mindset that continues to serve him well. Dry years from 2017 to 2019 were followed by bumper crops in 2021 and 2022.

“We still make our plan so we’ve got a blueprint to work from, but when need be we will drop non-profitable paddocks,” Bradley says.

“We try and set it up for an average year in terms of inputs. We’d sit down on a Monday, and as the dates went by, we’d say ‘Rightio, that paddock comes out … that paddock comes out’. The first paddocks to come out are generally the ones with a poorer soil type and lower average production, where we’d have to spend more.”

Watheroo grower Bradley Millsteed (left) and his son Dylan.

What’s next?

This season’s crops include 900 ha of Scepter wheat, 460 ha of LRPB Anvil CL Plus wheat and 30 ha of Baroota Wonder wheat for sheep feed and hay, along with 150 ha of Maximus CL barley and 90 ha of Coromup lupins.

Canola is back on the radar, even though Bradley jokingly describes himself as “Vice-President of the Anti-Canola Growers Association”.

“That said, with the change that’s going on in the background, we’ll be going to a higher percentage of cropping, and I’ll be very surprised if we don’t have canola in the ground next year,” he says.

Those changes include the farm restructure, a desire to maintain more ground cover and uncertainty as the sheep industry adjusts to the end of live exports.

The 10-year average annual rainfall is 348 mm, with 245 mm of growing season rainfall, and 10-year average crop yields are 2.6 t/ha of wheat, 1.5 t/ha of lupins and 2.4 t/ha of barley.

A management restructure will provide a pathway for Bradley and Denise’s teenage son, Dylan, to return to ‘Glenview’ when he’s finished his education.

Reflecting on key lessons he has learned over the years, Bradley says one is the KISS principle, an acronym for ‘Keep it simple, stupid’, and another is being adaptable and persistent.

“When things aren’t the best, we just need to be patient and know things will turn, even though that’s very hard to do, particularly when there’s big money involved,” he says.

Dry sowing, precision agriculture and more flexible crop options are among the changes that have transformed Bradley Millsteed’s farming business over the past decade.

This article appeared in GroundCover

Further reading: A farm evolution and the power of connection