June 2026, AU: Each year, GroundCover follows 6 growers across Australia as they manage the cropping season. In this third instalment for our 2026 growers, Deborah Hill, Nicole Baxter and Melissa Marino explore what happened on-farm in April and May, and plans for the season ahead.
Western Australia
Chela Dempster and her family are based at Arrowsmith, south-west of Mingenew. The farm is largely wheat, canola and lupins across 5 blocks, with approximately 1,000 Merinos and cross-bred sheep in rotation. With a predominantly sandy soil, the challenges are to improve this and manage weeds.
We had hoped for decent rainfall on the back of Tropical Cyclone Narelle in March, but the 10 mm we got was pretty disappointing – we had more wind than anything useful. During April we had 3 rain events to give us another 13 mm, so pretty much dry sowing for us. We started sowing just before Anzac Day.
With the fuel and fertiliser issues, we pulled the pin on doing more deep-ripping to focus on sowing. We figured we would be better off keeping what diesel we had for sowing and spraying. We have only just gone back (mid to late May) to a bit of deep ripping now that most of the sowing of the canola and lupins is done. I was pretty happy to see the fuel guy turn up. Poor bloke was juggling what fuel he could get hold of to make sure we all had enough to get us through.
The lupins are up but looking a bit thirsty. For the last of the wheat, we can wait until June to sow and hope we get a bit of rain. We pulled back about 500 ha of wheat planting this year – fertiliser is better spent on canola. We didn’t end up doing any lime either. This is a first for us not to lime, so we are hoping there is enough in the system already that it shouldn’t have too much impact on the crops. We will keep an eye out for bugs in the canola and weeds in the lupins in the next couple of months.
Our other focus at the moment is dealing with the mice – and yes, it is plague proportions for a lot of us around here.
When Tim brings the tractor back to the machinery shed, you can see a wave of mice moving in front of him. We are madly baiting – some blocks for the second time. We are going to do some of the second baiting using a drone, so it will be interesting to see how that goes.
Those in our district with a bit of soil moisture will do ok, but with our sandy soils, we need some rain.
Western Australia
The Smith family were Green Range pioneers. Scott Smith’s father and uncle cleared the original block for sheep, along with some cropping to help develop the new country. When the wool market crashed in the early 1990s, the farm transitioned to more cropping, which its light sandy soils made challenging.
We had good rain just before Easter, 35 to 55 mm, so started with sowing canola in the following week. It meant we started sowing in early April and finished around Anzac Day.
With a sprinkle of rain after Anzac Day, approximately 15 mm over 3 events, it was enough to get the crops established, even though it has been warm and windy since then. There is enough soil moisture to get the cereals up. The canola has been very patchy on the non-wetting areas.
The forecast was for good follow-up rain but we got only 3 mm. The thought was to plant winter wheat, but without that rain, we have swapped to barley. I was in two minds anyway with wheat given the margins – the lack of rain sealed the deal for barley. Seeding finished mid-May.
Late May the plan was to start post-emergent sprays on the canola. If we had had decent rain, the early canola would have been sprayed for weeds. By mid-May there hadn’t been much weed germination.
In May we saw early signs of redlegged earth mite and balaustium mite and vegetable weevils in the canola. We had some bad conical snail patches in the canola and some needed 2 rounds of baiting, but the numbers overall were low. It will be a ‘watch and see’. Any snails that are left at harvest can be screened out. Mice haven’t been a trouble for us – we still run plenty of sheep and some cattle in the rotation.
Fuel, nitrogen and lime have been more challenging to get hold of and some simply didn’t turn up, so we did drop the level of seeding phosphorous because of the shortage. Nitrogen should be delivered okay – more of a logistical nightmare than anything else.
For the next couple of months, it will just be watching the weather – too much rain and we end up waterlogged and with nutrient leaching. If it gets too wet, I’ll need to look at using higher rates of nitrogen, if the crop hasn’t suffered too much damage. Our country does better in the drier years.
Not too wet, not too cold would be good for the next couple of months!
Queensland
Mark and Megan Baker crop 7,700 ha near Orion in Central Queensland, with 3 full-time staff members. Their summer grain crops include mungbeans and sorghum. Typically, their winter crops include wheat and chickpeas. A neighbour runs 100 of his breeding cows with Mark and Megan’s 150 trade weaner steers on 2,428 ha of the Baker’s country.
We recorded just over 400 mm of rain from 1 January to 20 March. It has been dry since then. It would have been good if the rain had been spread out, as it caused damage to paddocks from the wash, which we will have to repair. Until 19 May, we were ahead of our annual average rainfall.
Given the low gross margins for wheat, we dropped it from our program and planted 3,900 ha of PBA Drummonda desi chickpeas across our entire winter cropping area. This was a calculated decision to reduce downside risk if urea became too expensive or too difficult to obtain.
We planted the chickpeas over 10 days, with a team of 8 people working around the clock to sow them approximately 12 cm deep into moist soil. We are confident they will come up, although 60 mm of rain would have been welcome. After planting, all the chickpea country was rolled to prevent sticks and rocks from being picked up by the harvester fronts.
In April, we windrowed for the first time our 2,500 ha of Green Taipan mungbeans, and it worked exceptionally well.
The earlier-sown mungbeans yielded between 1.8 and 2.0 t/ha. The later-sown mungbeans yielded less, at 1.4 to 1.5 t/ha, due to waterlogging. Nonetheless, we were pleased with the result. All were sold as processing grade for food manufacturing.
We discovered the optimum time to pick up the windrows was 4 to 5 days after swathing. We shifted to windrowing because China lowered its maximum residue limit for glyphosate in mungbeans from 10 mg/kg to 2 mg/kg.
Accordingly, we purchased a new swather, which proved to be a good decision, as we do not have to wait for the withholding period to expire and risk shattering losses.
We will trial windrowing our chickpeas this year, given how well it worked in the mungbeans.
We stocked up on diesel in mid-May. The price had dropped to $2.05/L delivered to the farm.
We started harvesting our 1,400 ha of sorghum in early June. At the time of speaking to GroundCover (21 May), we were hopeful of yields of between 3 and 4 t/ha.
The laser bucket is continuing its work across the farm. Last year, we started a program that will take 4 years to complete. This involves maintaining and adding contour banks to better control drainage from heavy rain across our dryland farm.
New South Wales
John and Sarah Bruce, with 2 full-time staff – Lilly and Tony – farm 800 ha. About 200 ha are dryland crops, with 200 ha irrigated, near Barooga in southern New South Wales. Their winter grain crops typically include wheat and canola. During summer, rice or maize is sown across 40 to 100 ha, depending on the water allocation. About 1,500 Merino breeding ewes form the basis of their first-cross prime lamb production system. The pasture phase comprises lucerne and arrowleaf clover. John and his team also provide contracting services to nearby growers.
By 19 May, we had recorded 125 mm of rain since 1 January, which is one-quarter of our average. April was extremely dry with just 3.2 mm recorded. The dry weather allowed us to complete our rice harvest with no bogging.
We finished our rice harvest on 25 April. It averaged 11 t/ha. Two weeks of 43˚C to 44˚C heat, which was unusual, were too hot for the rice and reduced the yield. The quality was high, enabling us to sell for $540/t, which was a good result.
We hired a contractor to spread lime. Another contractor, using a deep-tillage machine, mixed the lime to a depth of 20 cm, bringing it into contact with the acid subsurface soil. The deep-tilled country was cultivated and smoothed with a grader board. It was then sown to LRPB Matador wheat. Another part of the farm had gypsum applied.
When April remained dry, we decided not to plant our main season canola. After our grazing canola and oats were anchored, we shifted the ewes and lambs onto them.
Land forming continued, and 75 ha were sown to wheat. Work on the remaining undeveloped area will continue over the winter.
Our contracting work has been quiet. We sowed a mix of oats, lucerne and clover across 36 ha for a client under contract and harvested 60 ha of maize for another client. A third had us sow 100 ha of canola and 75 ha of wheat.
We assembled twin-coulter units, constructed a frame, and mounted them to the front and sides of our parallelogram seeder bar to improve trash flow. We also added a set of new tyres. The modifications and rebuilding of the seeder bar cost about $42,000, not including labour.
Paddocks were sprayed ahead of sowing, most with a double-knock and residual pre-emergent herbicides.
After 18 mm of welcome rain in early May, we started sowing Tomahawk CL Plus wheat at 80 kg/ha with 80 kg/ha of monoammonium phosphate. It was sown into dry country. We finished sowing on 15 May.
We had enough fuel and fertiliser to plant our winter crop. For sowing, we used about 25 L/hour, working at about 7 km/h.
Urea costs more than double what it did last year, so we ordered only one B-double load to start with. Usually, by 19 May, we have 150 t of urea on hand. The price has started to drop, so we will watch the season and order more as needed.
We continue to post videos to our YouTube account, Farmer JB Australia, to help people better understand what we do on the farm.
Victoria
Dusty Pascoe runs a mixed farming enterprise of roughly 75% crop and 25% sheep with his wife, Karen, and parents Eric and Fran, in Raywood, north of Bendigo. They grow mostly wheat, barley, canola and export hay and dabble in lentils and beans. They run a flock of 1,300 self-replacing Merino ewes and join 900 for the meat market, operating a small feedlot to finish their lambs.
I took over here 19 years ago and I’ve never seen such a good start to a season. We had full moisture probes and, with warm soil temperatures right through autumn, everything just launched out of the ground.
I loaded herbicide upfront with pre-emergents, and there was a perfect amount of rainfall to activate it. Combined with a good weed kill before sowing, our crops look really clean.
It’s my strategy to get everything as clean as I can before emergence because I don’t believe in-crop sprays work very well and they’re quite expensive. It’s part of the reason I use knife-point press wheels – because a lot of pre-emergent chemicals require that incorporation.
I’d be naive to think there aren’t resistance issues but, being a mixed enterprise with sheep and varied crop rotations, we have a lot of tools up our sleeve to deal with it. Export hay is a great clean-up tool.
In our rotations I pulled out of lentils for wheat. Rain was coming and I didn’t have time to inoculate the seed. It was a good move because the GPS was dropping out at sowing. There was heavy barley stubble and it wouldn’t inter-row, so it would have been a nightmare harvesting lentils out of it, with massive wear and tear in the header.
We had a few aphids in our grazing canola, which knocked some of it around, but the area that wasn’t affected did so well that I started grazing it early, in late May. The ewes don’t particularly like it – they’ll eat every bit of ryegrass before they touch it, but once they get on it, they do massive weight gains – it’s like rocket fuel.
Economically it was a big plus to get the livestock on so early. We get the grazing value out of the crop and then lock it up earlier, getting biomass back before we hit winter. I don’t graze past mid-July, but if I’m lucky, I might even get a second graze off it.
After sowing we rolled our oats and beans. We cut the beans quite low, so we want a nice flat paddock, and for our export hay, we don’t want clods. Our first urea application went out in May and into June and we’re doing our numbers on whether we do more based on the wheat price and fertiliser cost.
Off-farm I caught up with a lot of meetings including the Victorian Farmers Federation conference and the Nuffield Australia Farming Scholarship interviews for new applicants. It’s way more fun being on that side of the interview!
South Australia
Tom Michael runs a mixed farming operation with his wife, Rhiannon, and parents Neville and Sally at Barunga Gap, between Snowtown and Bute. He grows wheat, barley, canola and lentils and runs a flock of 1,200 to 1,500 self-replacing Merino ewes.
It was an amazing start to the season – warm and wet and everything grew. We had to get new blades for the mower. The trees we planted for our regeneration program went from the size of a Coke can to growing out of the top of the tree guards in what seemed like a blink of an eye.
The caveat is that along with the crops, weeds also grew really well. Through to April the germinations just kept on coming. We kept knocking them back, but resistant ryegrass was still there when we planted our crops.
So I used new technology, Terrad’or® (a new Group 14 spike herbicide).
We also had to do some heavy lifting with our Clearfield® canola, in-crop spraying with ‘IMI’ chemistries after ryegrass, and marshmallow weeds grew faster than the crop.
I’m very pleased, but this is offset by concern around making the most of the season. Quite often we’re anxious about rain, but now I’m anxious about meeting potential. In spring there will be the chance of frost or lack of rain, so I needed to ensure the crops were nice and clean to begin with to give them every chance.
Given sowing conditions and the market, we increased our canola and decreased wheat. Canola prices are more firmly attached to the oil price than wheat, so it reduced risk in a high-cost environment. And it is exceptionally good at harvesting water through the profile.
We found green peach aphid in canola for the first time since 2014, thanks to the green bridge through autumn, so we had to spray that.
Through June we applied urea based on results from deep nitrogen testing. We snuck in rolling either side of rain events. Because we are quite stony, we roll all our paddocks to protect harvesting equipment. It’s essential to have a nice smooth finish on our paddocks, free of dirt clods and stone, particularly for lentil harvest.
I forward sold some grain because I’ve got trust in the season and there were good prices, especially for canola.
I travelled to Sydney for the GrainGrowers National Policy Group in June. We’re dealing with issues such as fuel and fertiliser access, as well as labour and childcare, which is really important for people in the regions.
Also Read: UPL Recognized as Top Innovator in AgriBusiness at Clarivate South Asia Innovation Awards 2026
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