Don Piper – Paddock Roundup – March 2026

Violet Town, VIC

March 2026

What were your summer harvest results? Things you learnt and will adapt for season ahead?

Our wheat was better than expected, considering the season and GSR. We had some paddocks that really persisted well from late sowing as I held off waiting for rain. They had a tough time of it from the word go and surprisingly still managed to yield close to 3t/ha. Our country that went in on our normal timeframe persisted well and ranged from 3.5-4.2t/ha.

Our canola on the other hand suffered from a late season frost and severe wind. Areas not affected yielded 2-2.3t/ha, yet our average was 1.3t/ha which was a bit of a disappointment considering what was there to start.

On the pasture front we clutched a small win from the jaws of defeat with some late rain that allowed us to grow a small amount of feed to finish lambs to a pretty nice standard then sell them as suckers.

What are you doing differently this time of year to this time last year?

For starters we have lambs in a feedlot which we did not have last year! With the ewes we have incorporated beans into the feed ration pre and post-joining to keep condition and help with conception. This is something I’ve been playing around with for a few seasons and seem to have produced good results this year. Scanning results will tell the true story.

This year we are also NOT spraying anywhere near as many summer weeds as last year. I’m not sure why considering we had 91mm of rain mid-December, however, I think good groundcover has held a lot of hairy panic at bay and I’ve been utilising sheep in large mobs to control melons before they got too large.

Paddock trials/biology /no-till/soil health practices you have put into place.

I’ll be using a vermicast extract which we will make on farm as a water replacement in the liquid brew down the tube. This is mainly to increase biological activity early in the plant’s life with an eye to setting up the plant to be healthy/balanced enough to defend itself against the dreaded red-legged earth mite. In crop we are going to perform three foliar passes this year where most crops only had two last year. The importance of an early foliar application can’t be overlooked especially in conjunction with a good liquid package down the tube at sowing and sap analysis later in season.

Has your fertiliser strategy changed?

We will again be reducing synthetics by a small amount and incorporating chicken manure fertiliser as well. Down the tube will be a mix of a small amount of urea (30kg/ha) and MAP (30kg/ha) along with the manure pellet. This should hopefully help the biology and general plant health largely with an eye to preventing early pest attack and increasing early plant vigour.

We are also doing trials on the effectiveness of high dose liquid applications of phosphorous and calcium to see if we can get it down into the rhizosheath and observe if the roots start doing some work for us in buffering acidity. Plans are for a side-by-side trial of liquid superphosphate against granular single super on paddock scale in pasture, however, this may get ushered into next season.

How have you managed your livestock with your cropping program over the past year?

Unfortunately, we couldn’t graze our grazing variety wheat with under-sown clover last season. The plan was to utilise them with ewes and lambs at foot, then potentially a second late graze with weaned lambs, however, the season just did not allow for that.

A new buffer pellet in the feedlot has had good results with below 0.4% deaths. Over two pens with 340-360 per pen, we only lost two lambs with one being a typical sheep who thought putting its head between dual wheels of a full feeder was a top move.

What didn’t work

What didn’t work was overgrazing a couple of stubble paddocks. I was amazed and how quickly the sheep started to consume the stubble in conjunction with loose lick and lick blocks. In hindsight we were about five days late with two moves and with 49.5mm of February rain I’ve been caught out by breaking my 90% groundcover rule.

What were your grass/dry matter yields and utilisation over the past 12 months?

We were still carrying too many sheep in a tough season (even after selling all ewes that were only carrying a single lamb), which meant we didn’t have room to move in terms of feed utilisation. We were more set stocked through lambing and into spring than I would have liked. The missing link was not getting the opportunity to graze the crops and rest the grazing paddocks. The only thing that saved our hides was the feed wedge we had built by keeping sheep off lambing paddocks as long as possible pre-lambing. One thing we really had not forecast was the amount of grazing pressure we experienced from very high numbers of kangaroos.

Pulling the trigger early on selling single-bearing ewes made quite a lot of difference to the initial feed pressure we had with the poor start. It was a hard call, as there was high demand for meat and a fair few good breeding animals went to the abattoir rather than another farm. We still had to trail feed the multiple bearing ewes for a while whilst lambing, which is not a great job. We tried to minimise the stress on the animals and us by feeding hay first or having hay feeders in the paddock, which helped avoid too much mismothering. Feeding early to mid-morning was also vital to give everyone time to mother up again before dark.

Podcasts and books

Lately I’ve been listening to Biological Farming – Round Table hosted by Nakala Maddock. Her chats with Dan Kittrredge and John Kempf have reaffirmed our push to incorporate biology into our system, understanding that biology is not the be all and end all. Rather, working it into our system as we evolve.

I also quite often listen to the John Kempf podcast to make sure I don’t get ahead of myself and repeat any mistakes which I refer to as ‘learnings’. Gabe Brown can be a polarising figure, however, I get a lot out of his book Dirt to Soil which I recently re-read – largely the need for stock density and movements and resting the country after grazing.

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