The Hirsch family has been working the Latham sand plains in WA's northeastern weak belt for decades. They've also been part of the GRDC's case study book, Maximising crop potential in a drying environment, an initiative of the regional cropping solutions network west. In the last ten years we've made a focus to try and get out crop out of the ground as early as possible. That's been through mixture of dry sewing, maintaining soil residue and and summer soil moisture and through a bit of deep ripping to try and make sure that the crop we do get established early can be maintained healthily through a dry period. Dylan says the practice offers more vigorous establishment through the cold of June and July and when winter weeds compete with crops and an earlier flowering crop reduces the risk of September heat stress improving yield potential. Yeah we've been constantly surprised that how early we can actually go with all of our crops, canola, wheat, barley and even lupins. At this stage we're trying canola even as early as late March and cereals as early as early April. The early sewing program is part of a strategy adopted by the Hirschers involving deeper sewing to utilize subsoil moisture accessed through deep ripping. So on this side of me we've got a two ton per hectare wheat crop which is typical for a normal year here with subsoil compaction and on this side we've got a leviated compaction using date ripping where we can see about four ton per hectare crop and two ton per hectare response from deep ripping. The Hirschers have a large scale deep ripping program around 25% of the responsive error each year meaning a three-year rotation. Around 4,000 hectares have been ripped, emeliorating compacted soils and increasing yield potential. We first started ripping back in 2016 with a few trial strips and then proceeded to in 2017 and 2018 we've been had a full deep ripping program using a tillco ripper predominantly to a depth of 500 millimeters using inclusion plates. Their most responsive crop to deep ripping is really canola so we'll try and create a system where we deep rip and then subsequently sew that into canola straight after the ripping. My deep ripping I love it it's not suited to all country but it's very good on this farm and it's very profitable as well. Yeah hopefully something like a four-million dollar crop well in the year. Sewing depth on these paddocks traditionally had been at 25 millimeters since deep ripping began cereals have been sewn at about a hundred millimeters deep. The trick is to try and get the seed deep enough into their moisture to make sure it germinates that can mean going deeper rather than shallower we found that sewing the seed deeper than we would like to into moisture is better than making a compromise and only getting it just into moisture but shallower. Seat placement can be challenging in deep rip soils because the soil surface is often left uneven meaning depth at seeding can vary so crumble rolls behind the ripper are being trialled. So what we're trying to do is really in trying to improve with an engineering solution trying to and trying to leave that surface a little bit more even and firm so that when we subsequently seed into it that each time is is very similar in depth than that now was to be a bit more accurate with that seed placement. The region is low rainfall but in 2017 it was the driest on record just a hundred and twenty millimeters recorded for the cropping season on this farm. Early crop establishment on deep rip soils meant sufficient subsoil moisture depth which supported the early sewn crops later in the season when they were producing pods or filling grain. On the untreated country the canola yielded nothing at all while the rip paddocks yielded an average of 0.75 tons per hectare. The Hirsch family took this as proof that the strategy was working for them. Knowing that we've got that extra 30 to 40 millimeters of plant available moisture means that we've got better confidence sewing earlier and knowing that we're going to achieve a good good crop at the end of the year. Go to the description bar below for the latest information links and resources.