Welcome to the Adelaide Hills and Fleurieu Farmcast – the monthly podcast where we let you know what we’ve been up to on farm and what makes sense for you to be doing on your farm or lifestyle property.

Over the past 12 months we’ve run through an almanac of farm management tasks to do every month but now we’re going to take a broader view.

Also, we have some guest interviews to take us deeper into some very timely topics.

So, join us as we take a broader look at farm operations and focus on one or two key things that you need to address as a part of running your small acreage farm throughout the year.

We have plenty of fodder to work through, but if you’d like to suggest a topic for us to discuss, please send us an email.

Thanks for listening to the Adelaide Hills & Fleurieu Farmcast. We hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s episode and jotted down a few things for your to-do-list.

00:00 Adelaide Hills Farmcast March Edition

Introduction

00:50 Topics

Horses

Japanese encephalitis in horses. Look for symptoms.

Summer weed spraying

Ours is all done. Finally got our hay bales off and able to spray.

And we’ve just had lime added to our two hay paddocks at a rate of 2 tonnes to the hectare.

Pods and Craig are out spraying Potato weed, caltrop blanket weed, buckbush, milk thistle stick wart for clients today and tomorrow they are heading just down the road to spray Cooch & Kiakoya.

Heiffers

Our heifers – many lessons learned:

• Don’t buy the ones you don’t want
• When you get them onto your property, assume they haven’t been vaccinated and administer a 5 in 1 vaccine immediately followed by the booster shot 4-6 weeks later
• And get all instructions from your vet in writing. Ie. Whether you’re administering an anti inflammatory every day for 3 days or once every 3 days.

And consider getting an autopsy. We did, courtesy of Dr Jeremy Rogers, Senior Veterinary Officer PIRSA.

Vaccination protocol for cattle

Biosecurity. The document highlights on-farm biosecurity practices as key to:

• producing healthy livestock
• maintaining access to premium markets
• combatting the constant threat of exotic and endemic diseases

More spraying insights

Talking of spraying, we met up with the powerhouse duo behind DART recently. Dart, or Drone agricultural remote technology is a new operator in south Australia offering spraying, seeding and mapping via drone technology. These guys can get your spraying or seeding program done quicker and with more accuracy than traditional boom sprays and they specialise in managing hard to access areas like steep hills and river beds and of course, they don’t need to worry about getting bogged in winter!

You can find more about them via their website: droneagremotetech.com.au.

WOTL Event

I attended a WOTL event: Back to basics best practice farm animal husbandry, Kuitpo. If you'd like more information, talk a look at the WOTL website.

11:40 Farmcast Interview: Michael Bowden, Hills Farm Supplies

Many of you would know Bodes or Michael Bowden from Hills Farm Supplies in Mount Barker.

Bodes and Pods went to Roseworthy together and we caught up with him to talk about capeweed and the best time to undertake a spray program.

24:16 Farmcast Interview: Anthony Chick from Optiweigh

I was lucky enough to attend the sold out Ag tech conference, Evoke Ag in Adelaide last week.

Whilst I did enjoy the conference, it was the Exhibition and start-up alley that I found interesting. There were some fabulous technologies on display and some fabulous concepts that are well beyond my pay grade.

I met with Anthony Chick from Optiweigh and asked him about his in-paddock weighing system and most importantly, what the benefits of the technology are.

30:37 Farmcast Interview: Dwain Duxson from Farm Tender

I also caught up with Dwain Duxson from Farm Tender.

Farm Tender is an online sales platform for all things agriculture.

His insights into the ag-tech sector and whats next for agriculture are definitely worth listening to.