Planting Sorghum Again

We have just finished planting about 600 ha (1500 acres) of sorghum on our second field. This is our son James on the tractor. We have Sorghum only 2km away that is about two weeks off harvest and here we are planting.Full profile of moisture in this country, we dry planted into the top dry 100mm of soil and only days ago received about 30mm which should join up the moisture and germinate the seed. Wait and see. We also flew a pre emergent on after planting and so the rain was excellent to incorporate this and activate it.

Harvester Arrives from Germany

Our new second hand harvester arrived a week or so ago, very happy with it, we have currently got it pulled apart to repair some damaged sieves although everything else looks very good.

Field Day

We had a good field day about 10 days ago at our farm, we dug a soil pit to show the root exploration, explained a bit about the different properties of the different soil types plus lots of other things relating to our sorghum crop. We are gaining some good traction with much interest in what we are trying to show. i.e that cropping can be successful on these heavy soils in the lower rainfall areas.
 

800,000 Flying Rats

We have had some serious bird numbers on the sorghum over the past two weeks, on Friday I had the Government bird man come and visit our farm to access them.
He made an estimate of 800,000 which believe it or not is not as many as there could be.
We tracked the birds (red billed Qualia) to their roost about 10km from the crop and are "Exploring" our options.
We have added some more bird scarers, we have 41 people now who start at daylight work until about 10/11am when the birds stop feeding and then start again mid afternoon.
The birds can eat 10 grams per bird so they could be eating 8t per day, I don't think they would be because of the bird scarers, as they don't get much undisturbed eating time.Still they could be getting 4t which is still bad.
One good thing is that they only will eat the sorghum while the grain is at the milky dough stage, this reduces the risk time which is good.