week #20 – Seeding Pingrup

Alan Smith and his wife Susan live on their farm, Galimba, just outside of Pingrup.  A small wheatbelt farming town, Pingrup is about 2 hours north and a little east of Albany.  Alan has big farm.  About 4,600 hectares, or, in the old scale, about 12,000 acres big.  After giving up stock a few years back, Alan now concentrates solely on crops of lupins, canola, barley and wheat.  Seeding that amount of land takes Alan and his current full time worker, Louie, almost 6 weeks.  Machinery runs almost around the clock. Alan himself works between 18-20 hours a day.

Everyone knows farming can be fickle, and to a large degree, at the whim of mother nature.  However if you ask Alan about the outlook for this season he is very upbeat.  “It’s looking very nice, as nice as I can remember.  I can not honestly remember another year where seeding has been as good.”  Let’s hope that this season is a bumber crop.