This is Seeds for Success, a show where we have a good yarn about ag life with producers who are having a go. On the show you'll hear from farmers in New South Wales who are out there battling the elements, making tough calls, and getting the job done. You'll get a laugh out of some of their stories and also pick up some know- how along the way. I'm your host Neroli Brennan. Today we're catching up with Paul Jameson. Paul runs a livestock business on Pine Knoll Park, a 460-
acre property near Geurie. Paul is currently the New South Wales Livestock Stud Manager for Elders and utilizes this experience to run sheep and cattle on what was once a blank canvas 10 years ago when he purchased the property. Over this period, Paul has invested in improving the infrastructure and establishing permanent pastures, including tropical pasture mixes, temperate pastures, and the additional dual- purpose crop when the season allows.
Paul is also part of our Farming Forecaster network, which is recently ventured into the central west region and as you'll hear him explain, he identifies why he's so excited about this opportunity to forecast pasture growth and get real- time data from his farm. You'll also hear Paul speak to his experience as a stud livestock specialist and shares with us some of the important things to consider as producers coming out of the silly sale season and bringing
those new purchases home. Local land services cropping advisor Tim Bartimote sat down with Paul early one morning to have this chat in our Dubbo office.
Right. Well, welcome back listeners to the Seeds for Success podcast. Today I'm here with Paul Jameson. How are you going today, Paul?
Yeah, really well, Tim. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. Good to have a chat.
Thanks for squeezing this in. A bit of an early morning start, which is great. Maybe we get a conversation that's firing on all cylinders, but we're going to have a chat about Pine Knoll, your place just outside of Dubbo. Can you let the listeners know a bit about that?
Yeah, just 10 years ago now, Tim, I guess I'd been decades or a long time trying to scratch enough, a few funds together to buy a bit of land. I grew up on a property, so I've always had my roots on the land I guess. Fortunately about 10 years ago now, we're able to buy the property Pine Knoll Park. It wasn't named that at the time, but we changed the name. So it's just a beautiful little
450, 60 acre place just in the Geurie district. So yeah, just a mix there of mostly livestock, obviously in my career where the livestock background and so that's where my interest is. But yeah, just a nice little weekend style block I suppose you'd call it.
Yeah, right. So 10 years ago now, how did it start when you got it 10 years ago?
So when we purchased it, I saw the opportunity there to improve it quite a bit, both in terms of the infrastructure there, fencing and so on, but I guess more importantly, the upside in the productivity side of it. So that was really appealing to me to see that opportunity.
So we set about initially with I guess just hitting it with heap of fertilizer and stuff straight up just to stimulate some growth and pasture and so on, running just cattle initially just to keep it simple but then in a way, because it was a blank canvas, that's where we saw the opportunity and why we were so sort of keen to get our hands on it.
Yeah, great. So can you kind of describe the landscape there, maybe the soil type as well?
There's a mix there, Tim. It's got quite a long, about a two kilometer creek frontage, not a permanent creek. So all of that land, those paddocks along that creek are, I would describe them as a red sandy loam and they rise up to some lighter stony or probably a sand stony sort of ridge I suppose. So there's a really good mix, a good balance, but particularly those flats along the creek are quite fertile and productive.
Yeah, I remember I've been there once or twice now and yeah, it definitely strikes me as a bit more alluvial. Definitely you see the pastures responding in those particular paddocks quite well, which is good to see. And so talk me through that blank canvas. So basically completely no permanent pastures, anything like that is purely just native or maybe pastures that have been let go a bit.
In was primarily just native pastures. So I could see that the place had been many years ago it had been farmed. It was quite evident just with clearing and the stacking up of a bit of stone, that type of thing that obviously it had been cropped or pastured many, many years ago. As I say, we hit it with a fertilizer initially and just got that initial rapid response, 200 kilos, a hectare of single super straight up in that first year.
And then I guess as the income started to come from a few livestock and so on, there were a couple of pretty good years through that period in the early part of that 10 years that we've owned the place.
I guess it generated enough revenue or cash flow then to start to work on our infrastructure, but the primary focus initially was just to boost that productivity with a view down the track at the point that we're at now to start to really put some proper permanent pastures and so on onto the place.
Well that's a great segue. Fast forward 10 years, you've now got a few more paddocks set up like fenced off, but you've also got, like you said, some permanent pastures set up. So you've just recently put in some temperate pastures, but you've also got tropicals and then you also do some grazing crops. Can you walk us through the process with the... What have you got in the temperate pastures? What have you got in the tropicals and what are you doing with the cereal grazing?
We've just systematically sort of paddock by paddock. So it started with a process of just using grazing cleaning type crops I suppose you call them, so generally oats. And we've run through that cycle for a couple of years and then in the recent sort of fruit... Well one to say five years, we've started to plant permanent pastures starting with a tropical mix of Bambatsi, Gatton Panic, Sabi grass and so on.
Into probably a couple of our tougher paddocks just understanding that those grasses would probably perform there pretty well and again, just continue to clean the broadleaf weeds and so on out of that grass pasture for a couple of years. And ultimately over sowing it with some clovers, with some legumes. So that worked really well for us. So we went on
to do three years ago. Now the paddock that we're at the point now, we have it clean enough weed-wise to over sow with legumes probably in this next autumn coming up. And then this early this year we planted a temporary grass pasture paddock, so Cocksfoot, Phalaris under sown with Arrowleaf Clover and lucerne. So it's just a really good mix and it's firing away. It's just fantastic.
Right. So walk me through that thought process of having the temperate pasture. Because I guess the listeners can't see it obviously, but there's a temperate pasture and across the fence is a tropical pasture. Is that just more of a feed gap trying to fill that?
Yeah, absolutely. So as recent as the last couple of days when I was having a look, so the legumes in that temperate pasture now are flowering, so we're ready to move a few livestock off that paddock. And straight through the fence of the tropical grasses, identical soil types and so on. But just the converse in terms of that grazing window I suppose. So fingers crossed with a bit of moisture perhaps in the coming weeks and a bit of urea over the next few days that tropical grass
paddock in another month will have absolute power feed. So those livestock will just move pretty much through a gate, straight onto the next grazing system.
Do you anticipate any issues with the transition from the temperates to the tropicals?
I'm hoping not. I think souped-up or fertilized up, I think just the bulk of those tropicals... I think the livestock will... There might be a week or two of adaptation, I guess just from one system to the other, but I don't anticipate any great setback for them in that process.
And I guess with the feeding of that tropical pasture, obviously there's a correlation between the feed quality and how much fertilizer you put on it, so that's hopefully minimal. Coming off on the grazing cereals, can you walk us through what happened this year?
This year, Tim, we brought another new paddock into the system with a view to two or three years time again going to a permanent pasture. So we were able to procure some barley close by, Spartacus Barley. So it's an awn variety, so not brilliant for grazing or haymaking
but certainly plenty of good vegetative growth early. But we struck that warm week at the end of August and pretty much over the course of a week it came into head, so we basically sort of flicked a switch and we'll use that this year, hopefully get it through to harvest for a bit of grain, but we'll certainly put there in the first instance as part of a grazing plan, but we've decided now to potentially harvest that. So yeah, looking forward to seeing what yields we get there.
Do you think that'll be a part of your process going forward, utilizing, perhaps those cereal varieties that aren't typically identified as dual purpose per se, but have the opportunity for an initial little graze and then locking up later?
Definitely. I think bearing in mind that it is primarily a grazing system or operation, so I think I'd stay away from an awn variety of grazing cereal for that reason, just to keep the focus on that grain. So I've got more options I think. I feel like I've gotten into a corner a bit with it going to head I suppose. I mean I'm not really disappointed, but it wasn't the plan. The ultimate goal is to have that paddock all clean
and tidy. It was sprayed. We used in- crop sprays to take the weeds out so it's well on its way to being all clean and tidy for a permanent pasture.
Right, okay. It's just making the most of it while it's there, but end goal is to turn it into part of that pasture mix. That might be a good place to transition into chatting about Farming Forecaster network. We were talking before, just before we started the podcast and you mentioned that there was a bit of a cold snap, was it - 5 or something like that?
So where I met you Paul obviously was we were establishing a Farming Forecaster site, which is part of an LLS program to put weather stations around and trying to forecast pasture growth in a few months in advance and see what the weather's doing. So can you just walk us through your interest in that project and how it might help your operation?
When it was mentioned to me, I jumped at the opportunity, any of that sort of stuff, particularly given that I don't live on site on the farm. So I've grabbed the opportunity to use tank monitoring systems, anything that I can get my hands on to know and understand what's going on there. At times I can be a week or 10 days away and not have a clue with
what's happened there. But we were talking about that morning, so a mid- September, particularly cold morning in the Farming Forecaster or the weather station recorded a - 5. 2 temperature, at a pretty critical stage I thought in that barley crop that we were talking about. So it's just really interesting to have your hand... Not that you can change what the weather's doing, but certainly knowing what's going on and I look at it every day and happy to show
other people how it works. And I just think for me particularly not being there, it's just a really, really handy tool to have access to all that information.
And so do you think there's application there, not just for the person who's not always on site, but also for the person who's got such a broad farm, perhaps a fair bit of scale and so they can't physically access all those to have a look and they can just see that on their phone?
Even more so for those large operations. Mine is relatively small, but most definitely. It's just the ease to be able to just log on and just to have all of those recordings and there'll be more (inaudible) courses, as we know with the probe stuff when it comes online telling us what's happening under the ground as well. I mean even if you're on site, that's
stuff that you can't see or feel. So it's just to have an understanding of what's going on, soil moisture and temperature wise with these sorts of systems is just, it's an amazing thing to have.
Yeah. And I guess it's probably worth me mentioning that. Yeah, so the Farming Forecaster network, like you said, incorporates a capacitance probe to determine moisture as a weather station, but it also has a forecasting arm to try and predict pasture growth. And I think it's three months off the top of my head, but it's situated across the whole state almost. And so you can see eventually central west will pop up on this big map that shows you what's going
on across the entire area, which would be interesting. Do you think there's benefit in terms of not just seeing your own place but also seeing how you reflect across, say the rest of the region or the rest of the state? Is that helpful information?
Most definitely. And I guess in the industry that I'm in, the livestock agency industry, that's one of the tools we have as a network of businesses and I guess services to rural people is to have that knowledge of what the seasonality is across different areas for the information of other people, whether it's looking for agistment or whatever it might be. So with these systems monitoring a lot of that information digitally over such a vast area, it's doing our job for us in a lot of ways just
without having a conversation. It's right there in your palm of your hand.
It actually reminds me of a cricket saying, when someone strikes a ball really hard and it's going to the boundary, what they say? They say save your legs or something like that, like don't bother running.
Yeah, don't bother running.
Yeah, it's a bit like that with this. You don't have to go out and mosey around. You can just know exactly what's going on. In terms of just generally, not just Farming Forecaster, but utilizing technology and apps and things, do you think it's pretty easy to pick up or is it a bit of like, oh, this is how it works and it takes a couple of weeks to sort that out?
I guess I picked it up and I'm certainly no technology guru, but I picked it up straight away and I feel like I've been in this game now for 40 years thereabouts, and I think that the generations that we're seeing coming through now on the land or in the ag industry, without any disrespect to the older people,
but they're that way inclined. So there'll be no issue with the understanding of how it works and along with any other technology and that's being adopted, whether it's in the animal world or the animal production world or the cropping world. It's just like what we're seeing and the speed of it happening now is the likes that I've certainly never seen in my time.
The availability that is of various technologies for like off- site monitoring and things.
Yeah. Availability and I guess just the accuracy of it, if it's in the planning or the spreading of fertilizer in the cropping world or if it's in the data collection and extraction around the DNA and the genetics in the animal world, or the breeding livestock world. It's just getting pretty close.
So Paul, your official title is the Stud Stock Manager for New South Wales for Elders. Can you give us a bit of an insight into what that role looks like?
Yeah, so I've had, as I mentioned before, I've had now 40 years this year with Elders. I've always, even as a kid, had an interest in livestock. So I was very fortunate, I suppose coming out of Farrow to be one of the chosen trainees, I suppose by Elders at the time to join their company with a view to being involved in livestock somehow. So I've come through branch manager of a few different locations across New South Wales.
And here at this stage in my career, find myself in what we call the stud stock section, stud livestock section. So I've done that role now for the last probably six or seven years, I suppose, based out of Dubbo. So pretty much we service and look after... We do about 150 or 60 events and stud sales across the state each year with a really big dominance in the springtime. So we're
just rolling out of that period now. So pretty much it just involves marketing rams and bulls on behalf of our clients, matching up buyers with them as sellers, I suppose. And it's an exciting game to be in. We see some big numbers and some big prices at times. It really has a direct correlation with what's going on in the commercial world, just your general sheep and cattle markets that happen every day of the week across the country.
But where I guess we're seeing that the clients are making decisions today to buy a bull or a ram, they won't really see the progeny from technically for another year or two and not even get to sell it for another two or three years. So it's a long game, but it's fascinating to watch it evolve.
So from someone who's been in the industry for a fair while now, what do you think has been the impact of, say, online platforms to sell stock and even stud stock perhaps and people utilizing that to less so do face- to- face sales and things?
It's had a massive impact. So certainly really took off through the COVID period, Tim. So when people weren't allowed to travel so much, although we were still able to conduct sales, they were considered at the time an essential service. So you could have somebody turn up and film and photograph animals and still run an online sale and people could just continue to do their jobs and to get
their animals out there to the marketplace, I suppose. But definitely the advent of online platforms has changed the landscape a lot. I also do have a view that it's nice to have the people on site given that it is an auction situation. So that whole atmosphere of having a crowd of people there bidding at a sale in many ways is I guess a lot... There's a lot more activity, a lot more stimulating, a lot more sort of theater to it, I suppose, to have the people on site.
So it's a double- edged sword. It won't go away. It's here forever. It's still a growing space, that online space with marketing livestock and I guess with talking about technology and data... So it's all there right in front of you. It's written the information, the EBVs, all the statistics on the animals are very visual when you've got an online platform to work with as well.
That provoked a thought in my mind, and I wonder what you think about this. Do you think that having say a face- to- face auction versus something online, and you talked about it being almost an event and there being a certain atmosphere, do you reckon that influences people's decision- making significantly to have say, not to say in an emotional decision, but definitely if they're face- to- face that you might be more likely to buy or not buy versus online where it's a bit more cold, I guess?
Yeah, no, you are spot on. I mean, it's a fine line to have a conversation with a producer about which path they should go. We run some sales exclusively online and it is a bit pedestrian to be honest, but it's a best fit for that style of operation, I suppose. So you're 100% correct.
If you're at a sale where the interest and the levels are very high and for whatever the reason is that people want that article, it happens all the time that buyers will just have that extra one or two or three bids or just because they're caught up in the moment, there's no risk about that.
What's currently going on in the stud stock world that producers should be mindful about?
Yeah, so we're just coming towards the end, Tim, of what we term in our industry, the silly season, I suppose. So two or three months of bull and ram sales, particularly here in the central west of New South Wales. It is a seasonal thing that's sort of coupled up with when the joining periods are for the commercial producers when they put their bulls and their rams out. So we're a couple of weeks from sort of closing out
a really hectic two or three months of sales. I guess from this point forward, mid- October, those joinings will be happening. People have just spent the last few months securing their bulls or their rams to join up with their females at home primarily through this month, October, November,
in this part of the world, certainly. So I guess it's important that with that in mind, the condition scores of those animals, the general health of them, the females that is, and the bulls I suppose too, or rams, it's a critical period given that most joinings are sort of five or six weeks in terms of duration. So you've got that tiny little snapshot or that window of time to
get it right to get those females pregnant. So it's all about just making sure that everything's healthy, forwarding condition and it's got every opportunity to go in calf or in lamb.
And I guess it makes sense. You've just spent inordinate amount of money on a particular animal and you want their genetics passed on, so you want to put them in the best position to be able to do that and do their job, I guess.
Yeah, definitely. I feel like it's pretty easy for people, and I've fallen into this trap even myself, with my own little operation just to take the "she'll be right" approach or a bit of a shortcut, but you're really sorry with that sort of attitude when it comes to pregnancy scanning and it isn't what you thought it should have been, and what have I done wrong? And invariably
it comes down to the nutrition and the health. I mean, certainly there are fertility traits through certain breeds and types of animals that will give you heightened levels of pregnancy rates and so on. But I think the underlying thing is nutrition and health and condition, and it goes right back to where we started the conversation about your pastures and so on. It all ties in together. So if you've
got them humming, give them... There's any amount of, I guess, products out there that can also assist in getting animals pregnant. But if you can feed them properly and those bulls and those reams are in prime condition when they go out with those ewes or those cows, then that's your opportunity for your best gain going forward to get a live animal on the ground.
So yeah, I like how you tied it back because that's where I was thinking, setting up your pastures for success so you can set up your animals for success and get your whole farm pumping along, being productive.
Yeah, no, definitely a full circle, but no, I can't stress that enough. But yeah, just to your question, so I suppose the next three or four or two or three months leading into Christmas, we're in that window of time where those joinings are happening after we've just had this busy stud selling season with all these rams and these bulls going to their new homes, I suppose, and we look forward to seeing the results of what they produce next year.
Awesome. Well, thanks Paul, appreciate your time coming in today. Yeah, look forward to hearing how you get on with your pastures and that farming forecast aside.
My pleasure, Tim. No, no. It's great to have a catch up and certainly the opportunity for, you don't stop and think about these things at times until somebody asks you the questions. But no, it's been a great opportunity. Good to have a chat. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Thanks for listening. This podcast was brought to you by Central West Local Land Services. Local Land Services delivers advice and support to farmers, landholders and the community across New South Wales. To learn more, you can find us online by searching for Central West Local Land Services. If you'd like more information about the topics we discussed today, as well as links to relevant articles, fact sheets, events, and other helpful resources, we've added those into the show notes
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