Dale McCoy is in the process of transforming some of the marginal country on his central Victorian farm, situated in a 400-450 millimetre rainfall zone and comprising good creek red loams up to rising ironstone and quartz country and lighter granite country.
He said following agribusiness group tours to Western Australia and the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia, plus some local research, he invested in a H4 Reefinator rock crushing machine from Rocks Gone.
The 3-metre wide Reefinator comprises a levelling blade, four front row and five rear row hydraulic tines, and a following ribbed drum, all weighing 28.5 tonnes when filled with water and digging up to 600mm deep.
The McCoys pull the machine with a 375-kilowatt (505 horsepower) New Holland T9 tractor, and it also features Rocks Gone’s ‘Depth Master’ automation technology.
Suitable for ISOBUS and GPS-integrated tractors, the system calculates speed over ground and tractor load or wheel slip to adjust machine depth up to 50 times per second, as well as the level of its blade, helping to ease the demands on operators and tractors.
In their first season with the Reefinator, the family targeted about 90ha of ironstone and sedimentary shaly country across different areas, aiming to dig at least 10 centimetres and up to 15cm deep.
Dale estimated up to 500ha on the property could be worked with the machine.
“We started doing small patches in paddocks, but you seem to keep going further and further, and in the end we did the whole lot – and we will go over it again,” Dale said.
“We had our (Ausplow) DBS (seeder) go over it and that finds rocks, but what we noticed the most was that everything was fractured, so instead of pulling up boulders, they were just small stones.”
In a 30ha paddock, he said there were rock piles and stump areas and while it had been sown before, “it was a nightmare”, whereas now it could be farmed easily.
“We only have to go around the dam now.”
The area was then sown down to oats.
“The Reefinator smashes up the rock and fractures it, the soil mixes in and the water penetrates, and it might concentrate the moisture better.”
He said they also “reefinated” some patches in a hay paddock they previously couldn’t sow, and they cut the whole paddock, which had never been done before.
The McCoys have claimed about 40ha of tough country so far, and they are targeting another 45ha of rough hills land, plus they have chemical fallowed a further 40ha in preparation for the Reefinator that has only been sowed once previously.
“The plan down the track will be to crop the rough stuff for two to three years, clean the weeds up and bring it back to productive, permanent pasture,” Dale said.
He anticipated the transformation could be doubling the land value.