JOSH Krieg of Pine Plains always knew he wanted to be a farmer.
His father was one, as was his grandfather and great-grandfather, making Mr Krieg the fourth generation of his family to work on the Kangaroo Flat venture, near Roseworthy, north of Gawler.
Despite this, he said his parents were not willing to let him drop out of school and jump straight into the family business.
“Right through school, I just wanted to be a farmer,” the Pine Plains project manager said.
“For me, I can think of nothing better than working with my dad. I love working with my dad, and he loved working with his dad.
“But part of me coming home to the farm was that I had to bring something to the farm that the farm didn’t have.
“So I completed year 12 and did an advanced diploma in rural business management so I could manage the business side of things as well.
“I do all the grain sales, and all the planning, so crop rotations, chemical use, fertiliser use, and all that sort of stuff.
“When I finished that qualification, Dad said I could basically have the place now.
“But Dad and I have always been a team. I’m not his boss and he’s not my boss; it’s always a shared thing.”
When Mr Krieg returned home to Pine Plains, the business was cropping a little bit over 1000 hectares, but that has since grown to about 2800 hectares.
He said the kind of relationships he had with surrounding farmers had been mutually beneficial in expanding the business.
“A lot of our farming is where we lease a lot of land and work with other landholders, so we do a lot of share-farming as well,” he said.
“Since I’ve come home, we also run a contracting business. We do cutting and bailing hay, but the main part of our contracting business is spraying.
“We purchased our first self-propelled sprayer, so we do a lot of spraying for farmers who either don’t have a sprayer or need something bigger for clearance – and that’s anything from Roundup, to mostly herbicides, pesticides and fungicides.
“That has been a pretty big part of the business, but predominantly the farm itself is our main business where we grow wheat, barley, canola, beans, a lot of lentils and durum wheat as well.”
While wheat, barley and canola have been mainstays at the land since before his time, Mr Krieg said technological advances in the industry had allowed Pine Plains to enter other markets.
“Since coming home, I’ve convinced Dad to get into lentils a bit more,” he said.
“We didn’t quite have the machinery at the time, but now that we’re geared up with the right header fronts, and that there’s a lot better variety around for growing lentils, we’ve gone pretty big down that path.
“Lentils are very good for our soil, so we’re finding that the following year when we grow wheat on that land we’re having pretty good yields, and the gross margins on lentils are pretty good as well, so they do suit our area quite well.”
The added variety allows Pine Plains to be more flexible in reacting to worldwide trends, with Mr Krieg highlighting China’s importation of barley as a prime example.
“We always have to be looking out for trends – like China shutting us out for barley,” he said.
“We’re seeing other countries trying to become more reliant on themselves, but it’s not entirely possible, so we still have a market we need to fill, and it’s meant we’ve found other markets as well.
"It definitely influences decision-making though.
“Like this year for instance, we looked around and said ‘OK, China have shut us out for barley’, and the barley market wasn’t looking so good, so we cut back slightly on barley and increased a few other things.
In saying that, we do really prefer to stick to our rotation, because we find that chasing one thing doesn’t always work, and while it can pay off big, you can also lose big.
“Once it’s in the ground, you are watching what the market is doing.
“So you might look halfway through the season and see wheat is a really good price, so we can take out a contract and pre-sell some.
“But we’ll only ever do a small percentage in a contract like that in case something goes wrong, because if we can’t supply the grain then we’ve got to pay out the contract.”
While he admitted there were sometimes opportunities that fall by the wayside, Mr Krieg repeatedly stressed the importance of a scientifically sound crop rotation.
“Canola, or legumes like beans and lentils, will put nitrogen into the ground, while crops like wheat need a lot of nitrogen,” he said.
“So generally we will grow wheat after the legume so we can use that nitrogen, and then we’ll grow barley to use the remaining nitrogen – and we’re always applying nitrogen as well.
“In an ideal world, your ideal margins would be growing lentils, wheat, lentils, wheat, and so on with just those two, but if you do that then you run the risk of disease, so we see barley as a break between them.
“There is danger of certain diseases in the lentils, so if there is no break then some of those stubbles that hold disease can be left over and it has the possibility to carry through.
“In an ideal world, you want a three-year break between growing legumes. You can probably get away with it for a few years, but it’s running the risk of problems.”
Looking forward, Mr Krieg said Pine Plains would continue to look to be innovative in its approach.
He highlighted some of the ways in which the farm was still changing, including genetically-modified (GM) crops and the use of treated human waste.
“We’re always looking at new varieties of grain,” he said. “Just this past year, we’ve done our first paddock of GM canola.
“We’ve had some really good results with that; the paddock that we had it in was a quite a bad paddock for us for ryegrass.
“Because we’ve been able to use Roundup on it during growing season, we’ve found that it’s now probably going to be quite a clean paddock, and it did yield quite well.
“We’ll never go 100 per cent GM when it comes to canola.
“We’ll always have conventional canola as well, but I think that’s one thing we will probably grow on.
“Another thing is that fertiliser prices are looking like being about three times what they were last year, so we’re looking at other ways we can get our phosphorus into the ground without it.
“We actually use a lot of bio-solids – which is the human treated waste out at Bolivar.
“We usually do a couple thousand tonnes, and we’re hoping to double that this year.
“We’re always looking at ways to become more efficient with what we do.”
With about 100 years of family history at the farm, Mr Krieg said there were no plans to move anytime soon.
When the time came for a fifth generation of Kriegs to take over, he was excited for the opportunity to share the experience with his dad.
“My grandpa died quite young so I never got the chance to work with him, but I think it would have been pretty cool to actually have three of us on the farm at the same time,” he said.
“This place is so much different from when he was here. My great uncle is still alive, and when he comes here, he can point out where the horses used to be tied up and where the old barn was and all this stuff that really does make you nostalgic about where we come from.
“My wife Caitlin and I have four kids now, and I look forward to if one of them eventually wants to take it on, and seeing where they can grow it to.
“My oldest is seven years old, so there’s still plenty of time to think about it.”
