A student of the soil

FOOD FOR THOUGHT conference speaker profile: Rob Hetherington

• Farms with wife Judi and son Daniel, Kate and family
• Cropping and multi-species for dairy
• Lake King, WA
• Wheatbelt NRM Soil Health Champion 2022

At last year’s VicNoTill conference, Transition23, the buzz word on everyone’s lips was calcium.

This year, the Food for Thought conference will explore calcium in more depth and from the ground up with innovative WA farmer Rob Hetherington. Rob discovered a long time ago that calcium was the limiting factor to his soil health on the cropping farm that has been in his family since 1946.

Rob and his wife Judi took over the management of ‘Walma’, named after Rob’s parents Wally and Mary, in 1983. They grow multi-species for a dairy as part of an ongoing arrangement, as well as winter grains and opportunistic summer crops.

‘Walma’ is 2560 hectares in the Lakes District of the southeastern wheat belt of WA near Lake King. Average annual rainfall is 325mm, a third of which falls during summer where temperatures can reach up to 40 degrees Celsius.

An increasing salt issue and observing that things could be better, Rob has been focussed on learning more about improving soil health and biology for around three decades.

They put in place a number of remediation practices to address severely compacted soils, disease problems such as take-all, rhizoctonia and leaf diseases and insect attack in the form of grubs, aphids and mites but something was missing.

With an enquiring mind and as a keen student of the soil fertility school of thought of Dr William Albrecht and Carey Reams and continued by Neal Kinsey and Dr Arden Anderson, Rob understood they had a compacted anaerobic system with a lack of biology and essential nutrients.

Using his scientifically-geared knowledge he identified calcium, along with some phosphate, as being the first step to bringing their whole system together.

“It was clear that even though we’d made changes such as building kilometres of interceptor contour banks, added alternative type inorganic salt fertilisers, rock dust, direct drilling, foliar-type liquid sprays and grass-free pastures, we needed a new approach.

“Calcium helps flocculate the soil, bringing in oxygen, it also provides a means of nutritional energy for soil microbes.”

Calcium has stimulated their root, stem and foliage growth, helped build stem strength in crops and made them more resistant to attack by disease or insects and helped raise Brix levels which helps them withstand frost.

Rob has a knack of explaining complex scientific problems in a practical way. It is knowledge built from a lifetime of farming experience accompanied by extensive study and research.

“I’ve always had an inquiring mind and some people reckon I should have been a scientist,” he says. “I have a huge library and have completed a large number of courses. I get a real feeling of excitement and enthusiasm when I learn something new.”

Rob is also the first to try new things, and is never short of a gadget to complete on-farm tasks.

When he embarked on addressing his calcium issue, he recalls a salesman dropped in while he was top-dressing out calcium and phosphate and ploughing them in with green manure.

“He was trying to sell me a telehandler but I said, ‘I’m not ready for that because I’m concentrating on my soil fertility,’ and I think it gave him a bit of a surprise. That’s how driven I was on improving my soil health.

“There’s a limit to how much you can try from a financial perspective, but I always look at my soil health changes in the same way I look at buying a new machine. Even when you buy a new machine you’ve got to work your way through it to get it working properly to do what you want it to do. Soil health is no different.”

A vital part of his transition is monitoring, because you can’t manage what you don’t measure. He recalls the results of a follow-up soil test three years after he started taking serious steps to change.

“I still remember getting those results back and seeing my organic matter had doubled. I was so elated and thought to myself, wow, I’m on the right track.”

With decades of experience behind him, Rob has learnt valuable lessons. Learning to move forward from disappointment is important.

“There’s been lots of disappointments along the way, don’t get me wrong. It hasn’t always been a gradual upward curve. But when something starts to fall into place, like the other day when I took some samples and the calcium and phosphorus was about double of what I normally get, it keeps me excited. It makes me realise I’m going in the right direction.”

He says although farms are businesses, the majority of farmers are emotionally attached to their land and need to use this attachment and understanding of their farm to make good decisions.

“There’s paddocks where you know the soil is a little bit different, so you treat those paddocks differently. You get in tune with what’s going on around your farm and make decisions based on that. This is important to remember when you’re wanting to improve and change.”

Another lesson is looking at nature as a living thing.

“We’re dealing with a living and very complex system. Sometimes we bash it around the ears but it comes back and it’s still there because it is very resilient. But it has its limits. You can’t bend, mould or bash it too much. You’ve got to go with it and learn to work with it.”

Context is also important.

“Whatever the mantra or trend is out there you need to hone in and adapt it to your own environment and geography.

“For example, there are some people who say you don’t need phosphorus, but it is important to have it in your system; what you need to make sure of is having it in the right form. Especially in WA with our soils being inherently low in P.

“Another trend that’s growing is making biological solutions on-farm and putting them out which can work well when you put it out with moisture. People using these to support their biology after the plant has already been set up with its base foundation of nutrition are getting good results.

“I haven’t tried this myself due to our dry climate as well as logistical reasons; it just doesn’t feel like the right fit for me at the moment.

“Then there’s recognising that a lot of information comes out of America where they get a freeze over winter, which we don’t.

“Understanding context just comes with a head on some shoulders that have been around for a while.”

And the most important lesson of all? Knowledge is power.

“In the regenerative space there’s a lot of talk out there that you’ve got to look after the soil biology, so put a crop in with minimal fertiliser or no fertiliser. This might work on some areas and you might get away with it one year. In the long term though, it’s a downward spiral. I know that because I’ve experienced it myself.

“It’s a matter of knowing the chemistry and the biology, finding that knowledge and moving forward from there.

“At the end of the day, farming is all about mineral energy and controlling conductivity and knowing what to apply and where to apply it to get those reactions happening.”