CEI:AgER Field Trip

The first official CEI:AgER road trip spanned a total of three days and three farms, and proved to be a valuable learning experience on the challenges of farming in Western Australia, and the ingenuity of the farmers dealing with those challenges.

The first stop on the agenda was the impressive Spring Park Farms of the Messina brothers in Mullewa, WA. The team was fortunate to get up close and personal with some remarkable pieces of bespoke agricultural machinery, and was also privy to a demonstration of the Bilberry spot-spraying system. The need and opportunities for Ag-Engineering in WA cropping systems was clearly evident from the very beginning of the visit and this first stop on the tour. Through discussions with the Messina brothers, real design projects were identified to offer to UWA 5th year mechanical engineering students as part of the capstone mechanical engineering design unit (that CEI:AgER director A/Professor Andrew Guzzomi coordinates) with other concepts flagged for ongoing research and development activity. For many members of the team, this was the first time seeing this type of technology in person. The team came away with starry eyes, bellies full of scones and notebooks full of sketches and notes.

Next was a visit to the McAlpine farm in Dalwallinu, WA. While the crops were similar, the techniques and machinery were not. Mr Brian McAlpine’s open sharing of experiences and knowledge was of huge value to the team, and a valuable lesson on the impact of climate and environment on the challenges of farming. Mr McAlpine as an innovative and progressive grower showed us the commercial scale trials that he had established exploring high residue production cropping with the use of a stripper header front and subsequent disc seeding. He talked through the management and machinery challenges of transitioning to a new crop production system. Again, there was an impressive array of machinery on display, equal only to the impressive array of barbeque cuisine that Mr McAlpine kindly put on for the team.

The last stop included a visit to Lance Turner’s Goodlands farming operation. Again, the team found that while the crops were similar, farming in the far eastern parts of the Wheatbelt presented its own unique challenges. Lance took the team on a tour of several paddocks to explain various challenges such as large shrubby weeds highly resistant to herbicidal control approaches, the importance of water harvesting and usefulness of fallows/

The trip was invaluable for the CEI:AgER team and it was incredible to observe the innovative and forward-thinking mindset shared by all the farmers.

A huge thank you to Andrew and Rod Messina, Brian McAlpine and Lance Turner for their hospitality and willingness to share their knowledge.