2025 Hay Quality Award Winners – with Wade Alexander (Part 1)

Speaker 1 0:00
Hi, I’m Tim Ford. Welcome to the Hay Matters podcast, where the Feed Central and LocalAg team unpack the very best of what’s happening in Australia’s fodder industry. From planting through to baling, testing and feeding, we cover the characters and the information that matters most to everyone in the supply chain.

Steve Page 00:23

Good afternoon. It’s Steve Page here from Feed Central LocalAg and I’m here today with Wade Alexander, presenting him with his Queensland Visual Lucerne Hay Award and his National Dual National Visual Award. Congratulations Wade and thank you for having me again. We have known each other for nearly 10 years and have presented you with a number of awards during that time. Could you please tell the listeners about your farm and how you’ve arrived at this point?

Wade Alexander 00:52

Yeah, thanks. Steve. Wade Alexander, Mundubbera, Queensland. We’re approximately two and a half hours west of Bundaberg on the Burnett River. And ironically, Mundubbera means “watering place of three rivers”. So where Mundubbera, Boyne and Auburn River and the three run, well, you got the two that that meet and join at the Burnett and we’re just to the north of that meeting place of those river systems, We don’t pump out of the river. We pump out of underground water, ie, the bores. Years ago, a lot of the river licences were sold off, so we just use the bores that are on farm. A few of those bores are sandstone, what we call sandstone aquifer bores, and very good water, high quality water, and lots of it. But yeah, so how we come to Mundubbera? I’m a son of a poultry farmer, and many years ago, approximately 2011, my father bought a place out here and wanted me to manage it. Originally, it was just a cattle block, and we had a flood in 2013 which changed the course of history, you could say. We lost everything – we had a three month old at the time – and we lost tractors, trucks, cars, cattle, anything that that wasn’t bolted down floated away. So we started again, and when we started again, we did change our business mindset into somewhere where we should spread our risk a little bit more than just cattle, and concentrate a little bit more on the asset that we had, which was the irrigation, and that’s where we started growing some lucerne. Now I had zero experience. I mean, chook farming is completely different to livestock and and growing hay. Originally, the only livestock experience I had was I was a mustering pilot, and before that, absolutely nothing. So it’s all been a very learning curve, a big learning curve, in fact. And having an engineering background, being a engineer by trade, it sort of helped the foundations in a pathway to mechanically understanding the machinery and what was required for hay production. And that was, that was it. And a lot of lessons learned since then.

Steve Page 03:28

And Wade, you’re so you’re talking about your machinery side of things. Can you describe what machinery you have, your rakes, your balers, and why you chose those?

Wade Alexander 03:39

Yeah. So originally, when we started doing hay, we were just getting a contractor into to do the mowing and the raking and the baling, purely because I was so new to it. And, I mean, I was not to know what was required or or how long it took to dry hay or anything. It was completely from scratch. So I just relied on on other people and listening to them and and, I mean, we are in a hay growing area, but it’s not a large hay growing area. There’s a lot of citrus, there’s piggeries, there was dairies. But those that did have and did grow hay in the area, I took on board what they were saying, and and learnt from from that too. So it was a bit of a learn as you go. I figured that trying to match your mower with your rake was ideal. A lot of people had oversized mowers and little rakes and and to me, I just looked at that and it didn’t make sense. So I I started matching my mower with the rake. So I ended up going a three and a half metre mower and a 6632 Kuhn twin rotary rake. And they just seemed to work together quite well. We could put four wind rows into one, and then we were doing that round baling. And after a time, we had shed fulls of round bales, and we weren’t selling them. And the thought was entertained that I I should go into big squares, and that was unheard of in our area, purely because we’re just a small hay growing area. There was no such thing as anyone having a large square bale – that was just tend to be laughed at. But to my father’s credit, and we ended up taking that risk, and we bought a large square baler, a John Deere one. I’ve sort of been a little bit green ever since my childhood. Had dreams of having a John Deere tractor and a John Deere baler. So that dream did become reality, and we ended up getting the first L340 John Deere baler in the country, and I still have it to this day, with 30,000 bales on it, and still going good. Still going strong. And, yeah, we started making big square bales. Now that came with its own challenges. Moisture had to be regulated to a point that it was, it was a little bit, I was bit unsure of how it would go. And I was told, in our climate, being quite tropical, here where we are, we get heavy dews and we get moisture. And I was told that, oh, you’re going to burn sheds down. You gonna have issue with moisture. But touch wood, all that’s been controlled, thankfully. So yeah, and and then obviously, we started selling, selling hay a little bit more easily. It was, it was easier to and quicker to get off the paddock, and it stacked better in the shed. It sold to places as far as North Queensland and as south as Southern New South Wales, and as west Augathella. It was just amazing at how far the hay would travel. And therefore you just opened up your customer base from something that was very domestic, community orientated, as far as the hay, the round bar hay sales go, you know, it was sort of backs of utes and, you know, 20 on a truck sort of thing. But when then we started sending hay out in B doubles and big squares and tonnage, and it was just seemed to make more sense so but in order to do that, and in order to produce a product that the customer was happy to buy, and being new to the industry, I never had a customer base, and I’m not one for marketing. I’ve, I’ve never been a marketer in my life. It’s, I’ve purely just been an employee. So, yeah, that’s when I reached out to Feed Central to help market hay and, and then that’s when the standards, I never, ever thought of hay standards and what was required, until, you know, coming in contact with Feed Central 10 years ago, and that’s when we started. So the bailer I have now is 10 year old. I’ve been making hay for 10 years. So that’s a quarter of my life. But, and then, yeah, it was, it was understanding that there was such things as standards with hay that the same way I’d expect a standard in engineering or the customer required something, and it had to be to the best of its ability. And once I understood that, I started, and I’m a little bit naturally OCD, I really strive for that good product and hoping that it would be appreciated. And the way I looked at it, because the way I looked at a load of hay is, is, would I pay that for that? You know, would I be happy accepting that if it, if it arrived at my property? So that’s, that’s basically how, how I look at the hay making process and with the award I appreciate the acknowledgement, and that’s what it is. It’s acknowledgement of, yes, I’m doing something right and the awards that I’ve received have been recognition of hard work, which it is because lucerne hay to make good lucerne hay is, is like running a chook farm or a dairy, you’ve the hay dictates to you when it’s to be baled the lucerne dictates to you as to when it’s to be watered and to be mowed. You’ve got to be there. It’s you feel like a servant to it. And that’s the only way I feel that any of these recognitions are achievable. But you know, I don’t do it for the award, for the recognition. I do it for the customer. I do it for… the end product has got to be to be able to be capitalised on. The customer at the other end has got to make, make a living or make money out of your product. So if, if you’re supplying an inferior product, how are they to gain a capital growth on that product? There’s got to be a reason for them to buy your product, because they can see a capital gain out of it.

Steve Page 09:50

And repeat buyers, you get repeat buyers, and they keep coming back for your quality.

Wade Alexander 09:54

Well, it’s yeah, and it’s knowing, like, look, I don’t get every cut, right? And making good hay is very difficult and, and originally, I would, you know, when we did, when we’re just doing the cattle thing, I would buy hay, and sort of would question the expense of it. You know. Why? Why would just, you know, a bit of grass, in in a in a bale, be worth so much? But then knowing now the effort and, and what’s involved – I mean, it is a science. I mean, I’ve only been doing it for 10 years, and I still feel I don’t know everything about it. Every cut is different. And when people talk to me and ask me about making hay and what’s involved, it’s an apprenticeship, it’s a traineeship. And gaining that sixth sense to understand what that what it requires, and when it’s required, like when you bale. And our conditions are very challenging. We’ve got weather systems that can just pop up, and forecasts can be good. You’ll have the hay ready to bale, and then you’ll get 5mm shower. And that cut basically goes from very good to very bad.

Steve Page 11:06

So when you’re looking at your lucerne, you’ve got a stand of lucerne out there. Now it’s a new stand and some and it’s just at first cut, so you’ve got a little bit of weed and that in there. But in a normal cut, like the second cut on that, can you go through the process that you use to select when it’s right to cut your raking? If you’re looking at your wind row, you know you’re two days into it, or three days into drying. You rake, how often do you rake? How far apart? And what’s your normal process here to then get it into a bale and inoculant. So you, you’re a fan of inoculants? Can you elaborate a little bit on that for our listeners?

Wade Alexander 11:46

Yes. So weather dictates a lot of things, and I consult with my wife, and obviously, we’re in a family enterprise here. It’s just us. So my wife being a commercial pilot as well, we are fairly intense with the reading of weather charts. So I find dew point, humidity, temperature, wind speed, all dictates when we go to cut hay. If we’ve got a dry week – the ground’s got to be dry, otherwise you get the hay sucking the moisture up from the ground. So that’s one factor. So when was the last time it was irrigated? The maturity of the crop. So we look at stem thickness. Is it flowering? Is it 5%? Does it look like flowering? You can often see that that secondary shoot just sort of burst out one morning and go, it’s right to go. And then you go and check, check your ground moisture. Yep, well, it’s been irrigated two weeks ago, so the ground should be dry enough. And then we look at our daytime temps, any weather… we look at weather charts to see if there’s any any troughs coming through, or any surprising winds from the southeast, which normally would blow showers off the coast, over the range. So, yeah, we factor all that in. And like I say, it’s an art, it’s a science, and if you treat it that way… because at the end of the day, the cut we do… the expense that’s gone into to getting that cut… we’ve got to get it. We got to pull it off. We don’t have nothing else to fall back onto, apart from, you know, our contracting and my wife working in town. There’s nothing more that, you know, we can make a living from. So we mow the crop with the mower conditioner. I use rubber rollers. Don’t ask me why. I just… people enter into steel, and I’ve just never tried it. So I guess that one day the opportunity might arise where I use steel rollers, but I generally like the rubber. I’m only doing lucerne. I plant lucerne back to back. So I’m not, you know, mowing any forages in between. I would let it sit for a day after mowing. This time of the year where we’ve got dewy mornings, cool nights and the daytime temperature’s around that 26-27 degrees, I will tedder the following day. We’ve got a 9m KUHN tedder, and it’ll tedder the three swaths, mower swaths, and it’ll do a good job. And if you do it within 12 hours of mowing, there’s absolutely no damage at all to the lucerne. I will let that sit until that lucern’s just about ready. Now it’ll look terrible in the paddock, it’ll just look bleached. It’ll look ugly. And you think, Oh, this is just, this is waste. But then you go to rake it, and it’s beautiful green. You’ve only damaged one side of that stem. The other side, you know, or one side of that stem/leaf mix, underside of it is beautiful green. When you put that into a wind row and then bale it, it’s a very good looking bale. So that’s worst case scenario. Now, when we’re trying to get hay dry at this time of the year, August, September, very difficult for us to get hay dry. We’ll just rake once, probably put it straight into a wind row and not just use the auto steer to do that with our twin rotary just up and back generally, which had put 14 metres into one. thereabouts. And in the summer months, where we do have issue with bleaching because of purely the sun on the on the top of the hay with that bit of moisture from that morning dew will just, yeah, turn the hay yellow very quickly. So we will rake it rather than tedder it. Yep.

Steve Page 15:49

So you don’t tedder?

Wade Alexander 15:51

Not in the summer.

Steve Page 15:52

You tedder up to, what about what month, end of October?

Wade Alexander 15:55

Yes. To October, yes. And once we start getting those, those warmer nights and the really hot days with that, that dry wind we’ll just rake it and that’ll keep colour in it. And if we can stand that hay up in the paddock and get the wind through it, it’s like holding a hair dryer at it. Whereas, at the moment, we don’t have much wind, we’ve got sun, so we’ve just got to work with the sun. That’s why we tedder it. We try and get the sun to dry it, rather, and that time of year we get the wind to dry it.

Speaker 1 16:29

yep.

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Steve Page 16:59

So during the summer here, your temperatures would get up to, what your 40s, low 40s. And what about your humidity? Because you are so close to the coast here, your humidity factor?

Wade Alexander 17:09

Yeah, so we work on humidity to bale. It’s a dew point versus ambient air temperature, and that obviously creates a humidity, which is the dew coming in. Now, that all varies, but it’s amazing with the apps we’ve got these days. And being in aviation, we’ve got some very good apps, weather apps, so we can, we can look at them and see in advance as to when that humidity or that dew’s coming in, which makes life a lot easier than having to go out to the paddock checking it all the time. So we can sort of forecast, okay, on this particular night, at this time, all going to plan will be baling. And if, if it looks likely that there’s weather coming in and we’re trying to beat a storm, the hay is 90% there, not quite… we will start bailing earlier. And I’d run inoculant.

Steve Page 18:00

And what inoculant?

Wade Alexander 18:02

Well, been using Si-Lac Extra. There are a few out there. There’s a Sovereign, which I’m going to start trying soon. Just, yeah, trying something different.

Steve Page 18:13

What’s enticing you to the Sovereign? I know you would have done your research. I know you well enough – you’ve done a lot of reading.

Wade Alexander 18:19

Talking to people on the coast, they use it. So if it’s able to be used on the coast, I’m pretty sure we’ll have a good success rate inland. And the idea is, is to put a bit of hay, put a moisture in it, in the hay, in the good hay, to keep it together.

Steve Page 18:38

Yeah. And with that, can you tell us roughly what? What’s it costing you a tonne or a bale, that inoculant at the moment?

Wade Alexander 18:46

Oh, look, I can’t tell you, Steve, it’s um, it costs us. Well, I think it might be, you know, $250 to 50 tonne thereabouts, but the cost is the peace of mind. And if I’m sending hay to a coastal area, I want to be certain that that customer’s not going to have a product that’s going to cause him trouble.

Steve Page 19:11

So yeah, peace of mind for yourself and for your buyer. Okay. Going back to that, you said, you know, you’ve, you’ve come into this industry with very little experience in that. Did you have a specific mentor that helped you set up and get you going? Other than Amy, your wife?

Wade Alexander 19:30

No, not really. It was just something, something challenging, you know. And, and I’ve always been the one that, if someone can do it, well, so can I, you know? So I don’t really know how to answer that, Steve, but it’s just yeah. I like listening to other people’s stories and their experience, and then also learning from my own experience. Hay was never, ever one thing I’d ever get into. I never thought I would get into it. But it’s just where I am and you know, and I’ve worked with it.

Speaker 1 20:05

yep.

Steve Page 20:06

And we talked prior to starting this interview about your risk profile and that, and you’ve got off-farm income. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that for the listeners?

Wade Alexander 20:16

Yeah, so where we are at Mundubbera here. So I’ll take you back a few steps. So my family, I was part of the family side with my mum and dad when I worked for them, when we owned a property after the floods, my wife and I bought the neighbouring property, and it was an ex dairy farm, and it got completely flooded. A smaller acreage, but we combined the two farms at the time. Now, in 2019 my mum and dad split up, so all of their company asset was sold up, and my wife and I moved over to our little 300 acres here, where we do the hay and we got cattle, but it was never enough to support the debt on the machinery that we then had to purchase back off the family. So, in order to spread that risk and still do the hay I had to contract with the machinery and contract myself. So I worked in town. I worked for a company called Bugs for Bugs, and did a lot of the engineering in there and building and basically research and development for different beneficial insects and coming up with processes to filter and to feed and to water and so forth in that enterprise. Which was which was good, because that then helped me understand a lot about beneficiary insects. It’s just funny how things work. And now my wife works in there, in the dispatch side. So she sends beneficial insects all over the state, yeah, and all over the country, ironically, into feed lots. Do a lot of fly lay swings into horticulture. So she does that, and I do my contracting for neighbouring farms, and I also contract to a neighbour my machinery, to making hay and baling his hay and working in with him, as he is an absentee owner. So that worked in well, it helped.

Steve Page 22:38

That was your parent’s old place?

Wade Alexander 22:40

Yeah. So it was, it was sold and then owned for five years by a different mob, and then it was sold again by and then owned by the current owner that I now work for. So I understood where all the pipelines were and how the irrigation run, because I put it in. I laid the, I probably laid about three B-doubles worth of PVC pipe, because a lot of where, where we are and where that place was, was all six inch Fibro. So I laid all new six inch and eight inch PVC and made it a lot more efficient to irrigate. So the place where we being ex dairy, we had 60 years of dairy mess that we had to clean up. Being post flood, we had no houses to live in, so it was… no sheds. We had to we pull down all the damaged sheds and rebuild. And the beauty about having a little bit of a mechanical and engineering background, I can do everything myself, and that’s the only way I think we could have got into this, is if I did it myself. And yeah.

Steve Page 23:52

So on the financial side of the risk profile, how does that work for you? What percentage of the income or debt or whatever is related to the farm? And how do you work that to your machinery, that type of thing? Can you explain?

Wade Alexander 24:08

Yes, so, so with the machinery it, it pays for itself, with the contracting, luckily, and also with producing hay on farm. The I mean, because we bought this place after a flood, it was completely run down. So let’s just say it wasn’t worth a lot of money. No one wanted it to be honest, but what we ended up with, once we pulled all the pumps and worked out what was under the ground and the asset that we had with water it was made real to me that we had something special and, and also the land… it was said to me once about the country out here, and it that you’d “put a nail in and the next day you get a crowbar”, like it was, it was that good. And the water has got that much mineral in it that you can just see the lucerne jumping out of the ground after it gets water and our fertiliser is very minimal because of it. So we were very lucky. And basically where we need the off-farm income is there’ll be times when we’ll have shed fulls of hay and still have power bills, still have machinery bills, still have diesel, still have all the costs that associated with putting hay in that shed. And I know it’s people would say, oh, it’s money in the bank having hay in a shed, but it’s not. We’d like to think so, but we can’t pay power bills with hay bale, unfortunately. So there is that time where we need to still make payments, and therefore the off-farm. And unfortunately, we have to sell hay very cheap. And it’s frustrating, because there are times like when we get into this time of the year where there’s a supply and demand issue, and people are paying more for hay when they should be paying more. If only there was a little bit of, I know… it’s almost like people forget there’s a winter every year, and there’s no preparation. If there was preparation when the hay, like we can produce hay and put into a shed, you know, and there’s, there’ll be a price in that. People make a lot of money by putting hay in a shed and not selling it. And if they’re in a financial situation or position, they can sell it when the demand’s great. However, we’ve got nothing to fall back onto, so we’ve got to move hay. It’s just how we survive, unfortunately. And if only people put a little bit more foresight into working out what they needed for this time of the year, at the start of the year, they would be far better off financially. Instead of paying $550 a tonne this time of year, they could have been paying $450 a tonne at the start of the year, when we were trying to make room in sheds to put hay in. And I mean, some people do! I mean that we’ve got some customers now that that do forward plan, which make it very, very good for us. We can spread our financial risk out, because we know well, we’re guaranteed an income in that month, and it makes a lot easier to manage. But yeah, as far as spreading the financial risk being in aviation and flying a lot, I assess risk a little bit differently than probably another person would, and that’s just purely for my mental benefit, because I I’d rather not put myself in a position where the next cut I got to rely on to survive, or else I’m gone. I’d rather have no stress on that next cut. And look, if it does get wet, I could still make hay out of it, and we’ll still sell and I may not get top dollar, but that won’t be the end of us. And sure, I could probably find another job doing something else, but it’s I just yeah, you hate failure. Yep.

Steve Page 28:06

So what? What keeps you getting up every morning? You know? What gets you out of bed every morning for this and for fear for yourself and your family?

Wade Alexander 28:15

I like seeing progress and I like achieving something. There’s nothing like walking outside and seeing a green farm. Yes, it’s expensive to make it green, but it’s, it’s an achievement. And, and I, like, you know, obviously people see and come and pick up hay and go look, it’s so nice down here, and nice spot, yeah. And that’s sort of, that’s what, what keeps you going, is to keep maintaining that.

Steve Page 28:44

You have got a beautiful spot. I’ve told you in the past, like I come over that ridge and I’m just looking to the west, and as soon as I come over that ridge and see your place, it does. It always looks brilliant. It is a beautiful little spot in here. And yeah, I love coming out and visiting it.

Wade Alexander 29:01

Yes, but it’s, it is on a river and it does flood, and that’s something we’ve got to keep in mind. Although the 2013 flood, it was, you know, one of a kind. I don’t think it ever reached that height before. But we, we have that in mind, and we have insured so. Like we, we did learn a big lesson. And if you expect a disaster, it is generally not going to be a shock. So if we insure expecting a disaster, hopefully we come out of it. Not too bad.

Steve Page 29:34

We pause our chat with Wade here, and come back next episode for the rest of our conversation where Wade tells us about the disasters they’ve faced, what mitigation projects they’ve embarked upon, the three year planting cycle he uses with the lucerne and his plans for the future.

Steve Page 29:52

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