Calingiri farmer turns to lentils to cut fertiliser costs and boost soil health

WA farmer John Young shares how lentils are helping balance input costs and strengthen his mixed cropping program at Calingiri.

Transcript

00:00I'm John Young. We're farming at Kalingri, which is about two hours northeast of Perth.

00:05And we are lentil, wheat, barley and canola growers.

00:11We have decided to put lentils or a legume into our system to try and make our system more sustainable and more robust into the future.

00:18And we were finding our fertiliser costs were becoming a really big part of our operating costs.

00:25And with lentils or with legumes, we can lower those fertiliser costs.

00:29And I'm hoping we can make our system more robust.

00:33We can lower the weeds, the disease and boost our nitrogen levels in the soil.

00:38The harvesting point is the challenge.

00:40The growing the lentils, establishing them, fertiliser and the sort of chemical regime is all very similar to most legumes.

00:49My advice if you're looking at adopting pulses or lentils into your farming system would be to see what's being done in your area

00:56and contact other growers that are already doing something because there's lots of lentils and pulses in the ground across Western Australia.

01:03So lean on other growers and get some information off them before you start.

01:08And also with lentils or crops that are difficult to harvest, the paddock preparation and paddock selection is really, really important.

01:17Try and choose a paddock that is probably rock-free or as rock-free as you can.

01:24And then rolling that paddock to make it smooth, to make picking up the lentils or the harvesting as easy as possible.

01:31We're aiming for a 30% legume across the farm and to get there we will definitely need to have more than just lentils in the legume.

01:39So yes, we'll probably have some lupins, lentils and maybe faber beans.