Wayne and Jody Pech run North Stirling Downs Agriculture in the Great Southern, south east of Perth. Established in 1961, the business is a mixed farm focussing on sustainable production of high-quality food and fibre. The couple have two daughters who may consider returning to the farm and they now employ seven staff.
The business encompasses 13,000 hectares over four properties in a triangle from Gnowangerup to Cranbrook and North Stirlings. Average rainfall is 350mm and is becoming more variable from tropical weather fronts rather than the usual southern fronts.
The Pech’s carefully manage their natural assets and have shifted the business emphasis from 50:50 crop:stock to 60:40 in recent years as they were seeing stubbles run out over summer as a source of stock feed. The increase in the cropping proportion, which is creating more stubble, is now benefitting the stock and they can maintain numbers by turning stock off earlier. Stock numbers amount to 30,000 head.
Crop sowing times have been progressively moved earlier to dry sow and capitalise on stored water and rainfall events. They use variable rate technology for nutrient application, lime spreading and weed control to improve both the efficacy and reduce costs. Careful selection of crop types such as herbicide tolerant barley, mean they judiciously use herbicides in their cropping sequences. In 2023 they used urease inhibitors to improve the efficiency of their nitrogen. The Pech’s work with several agronomists to run on-farm trials to gather data on pertinent issues to better inform their cropping decisions.
With sustainability issues top of mind, the Pech’s started carbon auditing on their property working with Integrity Ag based in Toowoomba. This enables them to benchmark and track what they are doing to improve the farm’s sustainability and learn more to achieve carbon neutrality.
In 2019 Wayne joined AgZero30, as a founding member, a group of Western Australian farmers, and primary industries professionals and organisations with a mission to support the WA agriculture sector becoming carbon neutral by 2030. They are accomplishing this by sharing positive stories about responses to climate change from WA primary industries, as well as climate change related information and research. AgZero30 also contributes to evidence-based primary industries policy responses to climate change.
Beginning in 2020, the Pech’s have undertaken a 200-hectare revegetation project to offset some of our farm’s emissions, with a view to undertaking further offset projects over the next ten years.
Documenting the collective knowledge is important for the Pech’s family-owned business as it moves more towards a company structure and they also are highly cognisant of staff and family wellbeing which is built into the farm business values.
Wayne will share his family’s story encouraging growers and agronomists to acknowledge climate change and realise that the agricultural industry must be proactive to adopt new technologies and ways of managing in a sustainable way for the next generation.