2025 Hay Quality Award Winners – with Wade Alexander (Part 2)

Listen to Podcast
Show Transcript

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 0:23

Welcome back. Here’s the second part of Wade’s interview. We pick up talking about the floods they’ve experienced back in 2013, the experiences with their insurance company and the flood mitigation work they’ve done since then.

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 0:56

it, yes, but 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 did learn a big lesson, and if you expect a disaster, it’s 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 1:27

So when you say “insure” have you mitigated against potential flooding in the future, in putting up banks or doing different work, or where you built your shed, how you built your shed…

Wade Alexander 1:39

Well, the houses will flood but the sheds, the hay sheds, are all at the high tide mark. So I built them up where originally there was a lot of old little shacks. And this, being an ex-dairy, here was a herringbone dairy, an old herringbone dairy. There’s an old piggery. Was also an orchard. There were three families. This little place would economically sustain – this little place here – would sustain three families. Now we need three forms of off-farm income. That’s just how farming has changed. But, when during the flood, there was a piggery here, and apparently there were still pigs in it after the flood, so I figured that the water did come in, but not enough to wash them out. So I built the sheds to that point and a little bit higher. So if we got anything bigger, the bottom bars would get wet, but hopefully just the tractor tyres and that’s it. Whereas beforehand, we lost tractor completely submerged and trucks completely submerged, so and just having back in the day when we could get it, the houses were insured. The house is insured for flood.

Steve Page 2:46

And how did you get away with not putting the house up higher for Amy?

Wade Alexander 2:51

Well, we weren’t there. We were back in the in the cottage, but during that 2013 flood, there was on a high set, Queenslander, so we were living in a low set house, and then we moved into the high set when the water eventually come in the low set, and we were stuck. There was water on the riverside coming up, and water in the gully behind the house, so we couldn’t move. We had a boat at the time, and we waited till that boat floated off the trailer, and that’s how we got out. So we do have a boat here, if push comes to shove, but, yeah, it’s sort of like I said. That was unexpected. Everyone was shocked. Everyone was caught off guard. I’d hope to think now that being on guard, being aware of it, you know, forewarned is forearmed. Yeah? So forewarned forearmed. We can, we can manage it. I think, yeah, I’ll manage a disaster. I mean, I’ve had a few of them. We had a storm where…

Steve Page 3:46

I remember that storm. I remember coming out here when the shed had been blown. I could not believe that a shed could be damaged so much by wind when I saw it.

Wade Alexander 3:54

Yeah, we lost four sheds in that storm.

Steve Page 3:58

Well, I just remember the hay shed up on top of the hill there, and there were parts of that scattered all over your irrigation country. It was huge.

Wade Alexander 4:05

Yeah, there was, yeah, there was old grain silos that, yeah, that were scattered across paddocks. It was, um, there, that was, that was probably more scary than the flood, to be honest, that storm it was, it was deadly. So, yeah, it was, yeah. We’ve had our fair share of challenges, to be honest. Yeah. So what they say, it doesn’t break you, makes you stronger. So, and, I mean, it’s all been, you know, you mentioned yesterday about a hindsight thing, you know, and, and I think it’s probably best we don’t know what the future holds. It’s been a learning process, and that’s life in general, isn’t it?

Steve Page 4:42

So you’ve got no words of wisdom for you 10 years ago and you put when you first started making hay.

Wade Alexander 4:49

Look, I do. There’s, there’s many industries that I could have went into to make more money, and I’m not in it to make money. There’s just no, there’s not that much money to be made in a small acreage, say where we are. But it gives you family. I could have taken a job on a mine site and got good money, but being away from the family, you know, having young girls going through school now, and I got a high schooler, it’s just, yeah, I feel the need to be home, and that’s good. I think in the future, you know, I don’t know what that holds, but maybe then there might be a change in what I do. But, yeah, if you want to have that good family, work life balance, and I’m not saying there’s no work involved, there’s a lot of work, there’s a lot of long hours, there’s a lot of baling at midnight, picking up at two o’clock in the morning because there’s weather coming. There is a lot of that. And I don’t employ anyone. I do it all myself. Obviously, I can’t afford to employ anyone – I work for other people, so there’s no point employing anyone, but, yeah, it’s if you do it to the best of your ability, there’s reward for effort. Yeah, there has to be I mean, otherwise, why would you?

Steve Page 6:03

So you’ve built this place up since that flood like this, good sheds. Now you’ve got good equipment. The actual irrigation side is going well, where from what’s your next project for this operation?

Wade Alexander 6:15

Yes, so that’s a very good question, Steve, and our biggest issue right now is power bills and the efficiency of using the water we have. So for some reason, the government wants us to use our precious resource in the middle of the day, ie. solar, ie. that’s the cheapest time to pump water is in the middle of the day. They’ve got tariffs now where, if we, if we start our pump at eight o’clock in the morning. We get to a point between 11 and one where we get power a lot cheaper, and then beyond that, we get penalised. So we’ve got to use this resource we have that is, so called is precious, in the middle of the day. Now in how do we do that? Well, at the moment, we irrigate with pivots and high pressure. The idea is to leave high pressure, and we’re slowly in the process of, as funds become available, to put in a lateral. So where we had seven shifts with hard hose, irrigators, with pressure, we’re going to just have a lateral walk up and down the paddock and put on water, hopefully in the cheaper times of irrigation, and double the amount.

Steve Page 7:27

So you won’t put them on with the sprinkler side of things. You’ll be just putting the water onto the ground.

Wade Alexander 7:32

Yeah probably in sprinklers. Believe it or not, I think that, whether this is true or not, that the water needs to have oxygen in it for the Lucerne. And we do get – this sounds silly, but – we do get better yields underneath the high pressure. I don’t know why that is, but unless it’s more water going… I’ve got no idea. But whether it’s the oxygen in the water, the nitrogen, I don’t know, but we still use a sprinkler on a lateral. It’s just that we’re putting twice the amount of water. With pressure comes a decrease in flow. So with, with a lateral we got low pressure, so we’re going to increase in flow, so we’re getting a bit more out of our power usage. So to convert that paddock, you know, yeah, we’ve just got to do it as funds become available. And the other thing was, was solar? Well, I’m not completely sold on that. If, at the moment, from what I can see, we’re going to have an oversupply of solar power during the day, and I can already see now that they’re going to be giving power away during the day. So if you’ve got solar, and the only benefit you get is during the day. I don’t think the battery technology is there yet, but if the only benefit you’re going to get during the day is solar, well then why not just use the grid as it is when you’ve got cheap power. The problem with us going solar is we’ve got four pumps with an average kilowatt of 55 so we’re going to put a solar in that size, for four pumps at 55 kilowatts, we’re probably looking at somewhere nearly half a million. So we’ve got to pay that off. I’ve worked it out that we won’t actually gain a net benefit from that until about the eighth year. Now, who knows what the power is going to be doing in eight years? They might. They might say, you know, if the way we’re seeing these tariffs now change, where we get power for seven cents during the daylight hours, we why bother spending all that money? That means there’s less money spent on infrastructure, ie lateral, or, you know, a baler or a tractor, or, you know. In some situations, it may work for some person with one pump and, you know, a river allocation and one pivot, I can understand that – that would be benefit. But because that’s a low output.

Steve Page 9:56

Yep, so on that roughly, on your production of your lucerne, have you worked out how much water you use per tonne?

Wade Alexander 10:02

No, because it’s all different.

Steve Page 10:06

Different time of year, different rates… different, yeah.

Wade Alexander 10:09

I mean, it all changes too. So in a drought, I would say 15% of that bale is a power bill, probably more – 20% of that of that one bale is a power bill or is power associated to that bale, if you to break that bale up into percentages. If you get rain your lucerne does drop off in quality, and you do get less for it. Under irrigation, in a drought, you make better quality hay. It’s high in protein, and you get a little bit more for it. So it’s swings and roundabouts. It all evens itself out in the end. And where we can save as primary producers, the only thing that I can I mean, we’re price takers most of the time, the only thing I can control is price input, and that’s what I’m working on, is what it takes to produce that bale of hay. I mean, we’ve got to have nearly three quarters of a million dollars worth of machinery to produce a $250 bale of hay, you know. So there’s a huge expense there. So, you know, is it fertiliser, or is it paying a power bill? Well, you need water, but it’d be also good to put fert. You can’t do both when things are tight. So if we can, if we can try and make the water side efficient, well then we can spend a little bit more on that crop. I mean, a lot of money we get. We don’t see, you know that, but we pour into, well, the income we receive from the hay, and we put back into the farm – we don’t see a lot of it, because a lot of it’s either fert, water, diesel or payments or machinery. You don’t actually see that, you know, all you see is the hay in the shed. And you think, well, that did get there. Yeah, yeah.

Steve Page 11:53

So going on to your fertiliser, what is your programme with your fertiliser when you’re planting? When you’re planting a new stand, what do you need to put down here? And as the crop’s going through, maturing for the year, and the number of cuts you’re doing, what fertiliser rates do you put on? And what fertiliser?

Wade Alexander 12:09

Okay, so I’m probably a bit naughty here, because I plant lucerne back to back. I don’t have the privilege of having a paddock stand over or put something different in. So my farming methods are quite aggressive then. So I really deep rip and I square plough. So I invert the soil, I really get into it, and I rotary hoe it. I really smack it about. And then I put the next lucerne crop in.

Steve Page 13:14

How long’s the stand in then for?

Wade Alexander 13:21

Three years, and I don’t have an issue with disease. And I don’t know if it’s my ploughing methods or whether I’m just lucky thus far, but I don’t see a reduction in yield at all. I plant in rows. I don’t I don’t spread the lucerne. I plant in rows at five inch spacings. I plant at 25 kilos a hectare. A lot of people around here would plant 40, but I tend to plant less. I would rather get every seed come up than every second one. So if I can plant 25 kilos a hectare, and get every one of those seeds come up, well that’s a saving.

Steve Page 13:14

So by the time you finish working that country, it’s fairly fine, isn’t it? It’s a fairly fine seed bed that you’re planting into?

Wade Alexander 13:21

It is fine. I have made up a land plane. So I would rotary hoe, depending on how it looked, I would power harrow, so really smash it up again. And then I’d land plane it. And I would run across that paddock probably four times with a land plane. It’s a six metres by nine metres, and I get that paddock… it’s somewhat rolled in, it settles and it’s flat, dead flat. These paddocks have been laser levelled. I hate water sitting in paddocks because lucerne dies. Lucerne dies, grass comes up, weed comes up. So by running over this paddock on different angles where I want the water to drain with the land plane, the paddock is settled. And then I use a fine seed planter, and I just put that seed on top. I don’t even bury it. I just run a roller behind it, and you’ll see the seed sitting on top. And then I irrigate it.

Promo 14:16

With feed Central’s LocalAg, you can connect with farmers and suppliers across Australia, increasing your market and ensuring you get the best deals wherever you are. List your machinery, livestock, feed and more for free, and take advantage of LocalAg’s safe and secure payment system, Check Vault, to insure all of your transactions are protected. Feed Central’s LocalAg is providing Australian farmers with trusted connections and transparent trading.

Steve Page 14:44

So what’s your soil type here?

Wade Alexander 14:45

It’s a alluvial. Yep, it’s not a heavy black, it’s not a sandy loam. It’s somewhere in the middle. And it does settle hard, but it cracks. It does crack. It crusts, and that’s why I put lucerne on top. If I was to plant lucerne, let’s say, on a half inch under the dirt, it would struggle. You would have to really keep that ground wet. And by keeping the ground wet, you damage any new plant that comes up. And the hardest part about lucerne is getting it established. It’s easy to get a strike – you can get a strike on a concrete floor. But if you bury it, it will struggle if you get that crust on top, especially here. So we’re putting it on top, and then when you hit it with the irrigator, it’s just enough to throw that, that bit of something over the top, or just to push that in the ground a little bit.

Steve Page 15:39

So when you’ve got the pivot going around at that stage. What are you putting down? Are you putting down 10 mil?

Wade Alexander 15:43

Yeah, 15. We do light runs to try and put in, because we rake and mow over our pivot tracks, we just do some light runs to basically roll in that pivot rut first, the wheel track to roll it in, settle it in, and then I, I’ve got a hydraulic blade on tractor that I fill that pivot rut in until she settles.

Steve Page 16:04

And that’s before you plant?

Wade Alexander16:05

No, that’s once it’s in. And so once I’ve got the lucerne up, it’s looking fantastic. Every seed’s come up, I’ll give her Seasol. And that’s put on just through a boom spray on a tractor. Once the Seasol goes on, it looks pretty healthy. You’ll get a few little weeds pop up.

Steve Page 16:24

That’s expensive. The Seasol is not cheap.

Wade Alexander 16:25

Seasol Power Feed, no, it’s about six grand a pot, I think 6000 litres. But it does a job. It does a good job. Because I ploughed my ground quite aggressively it sort of needs something. Like it. the lucerne, it’ll come up, and then it’ll just sit there at that one point for ages, until it gets its root down and finds something it’s likes. And then it takes off. With the Seasol it encourages it. You can just see it, it’s wanting to go and it just needs that little lift. And then also, after that period, you’ve got to go in with a Spinnaker because you’ll get a bit of winter weed come up, and that’s my post emergence spray normally, and that Seasol just keeps that plant strong then. And you’ll see the Spinnaker does knock it, you know, but it knocks it less than any of the other – Broadstrike or two for DB or anything like that. It doesn’t kill all weeds, Spinnaker, but it does a fairly good job on most winter weeds. And I always plant May because you get June showers, which is quite good on young lucerne crop and winter weeds are a lot easier to control than summer weeds. And like I said, the lucerne is very vulnerable at that establishing stage. So if you’ve got cool weather and light showers, perfect. But if you’ve got hot weather and no rain, ie end of spring in our area, it would be near on impossible to get it established, lucerne crop. But once it’s established, you can’t get rid of it. It’s a weed.

Steve Page 18:00

So I’m surprised only three years. A majority of people would take it through to five to seven. Why three years?

Wade Alexander 18:06

Well, I’ll tell you why. We get eight cuts a year. Yep. So there’s a lot of traffic, and when you’re running well, you know, put nearly 15 tonne gear over it all the time, and then you’re running hay trailers, raking, irrigation, then you’re cutting again, it does cop a lot. So if you’re doing a cut every six weeks – so we’re doing our first now, and we’ll continue this right through the end of May…

Steve Page 18:32

And this is the beginning of September, the first week of September.

Wade Alexander 18:36

That’s right. So half of the year where we’re pounding this paddock, whereas, I don’t know, if you’re trying to get seven years out of something, here, this is my experience, is, we’ll have a natural die back. We’ll get grass come up. Yeah, sure. You’ll have lucerne there, but your yield will be out. Forget about it. So when we’re putting all this expensive power on our paddock, we want to get the most out of it. So it makes sense for us to replant. In the first two years, we’ll get out three and a half, four tonne a hectare. After that, it drops straight off. You’ll get grass, and that’s good for a Weaner Hay or a Grassy Lucerne but then with grass comes weed,

Steve Page 19:14

And that’s not the premium market either. You’re trying to produce, as you say, a quality item for a buyer who’s paying a premium. So you don’t really want that grass. The Weaner Hay isn’t a premium product.

Wade Alexander 19:28

No, but it’s, it’s a hay that some people can afford, you know, and you do need that. I mean, I got customers that buy good hay, and I got customers buy the grassier lucerne, but there still comes a point where I do concentrate more on the lucerne. And I’ve got cattle mowing, so I just, I see the results through them when I’m feeding them lucerne, and a lot of the time the grass gets left in the bottom of the feeder. So, yeah.

Steve Page 19:55

No, that’s good. So yeah, eight cuts a year. That’s fantastic. Just shows how good this region is climatically for you. Roughly what… how many tonne would you get in a year? Do you know roughly, would you?

Wade Alexander 20:06

So average, 900 a tonne off our 100 and… we’ll just call it 60 hectares (Steve) Off your 160 hectares? (Wade) No, no. 60 hectares, yeah. And 900 tonne,

Steve Page 20:20

So a year? So that’s going hard.

Wade Alexander 20:26

So, yeah, I mean, and then the other 150 acres, we’ve got 60 cows and calves, and we background about 80 to 90 steers. So yeah, we’re fairly well hammering this country. There’s a lot on it, and we’re trying to get a lot out of it, so there’s a lot gets put back into it.

Steve Page 20:48

And really, just to talk about your river flats, here we are on river flats and everything. How deep are your roots on your lucerne? Do you know how far down they go? And are they into any water table, or are they relying all on your irrigation?

Wade Alexander 21:02

Yeah, I would say it relies on irrigation. From what I understand, and the drill logs, when they put the underground water, or the bores down for the underground water, we’ve got six metres of soil, and it’s the same consistency all the way till it hits a river gravel, and then we call that our alluvial water, and those bores pump about 20,000 gallons or 25,000 gallons out of that river. (Steve) That’s an hour? (Wade) Yeah, an hour. And then there’s another 10 foot of sandstone, and then it’s just an open cavity under that. So those bores, they’re unlimited. They just, yeah, hoof it out. If you can pay for it, they’ll pump it. So we’re very… and that was all unknown until we put cameras down holes and we pulled them. So you’re very, very lucky.

Steve Page 21:47

So let’s just go on to your marketing side of things. You’re talking about marketing there before, and you know, cash flow and all that type of thing. And you have been marketing well. As I say, we’ve known each other for nearly 10 years with Feed Central. You marketing your hay through Feed Central and winning awards. Can you tell us a little bit how that’s progressed over those 10 years? What’s changed and we’ve now got this LocalAg marketing platform. How do you find that?

Wade Alexander 22:13

Yeah, so originally, it was not knowing my customer base, and that’s when I reached out to Feed Central originally, and it’s hard to market hay and make hay at the same time. I find, and I don’t have time for it. And then sometimes during a drought, you start up relationships with customers because of inquiries, and through Feed Central, also repeat customers. And now I’m finding through the LocalAg app, repeat customers. So that’s good, and once you build that, it’s like a database, a pool that you can draw from. This year we had hay stacked in sheds, and I could see what was going to happen and I think I would spoke to the you guys there in the marketing team at Feed Central, and they just, you know, just weren’t getting a phone call and I was scratching me head, going, what the hell’s going on? You know, like, how come we’re not moving hay? I fly around and see so much country… surely, there’s a drought somewhere. Surely someone needs hay. Surely does cattle need feeding? What’s going on anyway? Then all of a sudden, BANG, it turned. People needed hay. Well, just before that, I rang up my customers. They get hay off me yearly. We built this customer relationship, and I said, just thinking ahead, what do you think you’ll need? Because I can just see what’s going to happen here. There’ll be a big smash and grab for hay. And they told me, so I put it aside, and that that was good, because then, when it did happen, they knew what they had already booked up. And I put hay on LocalAg, and I got inquiries, and that was, you know, that created another customer base.

Steve Page 24:00

So, so you did that marketing yourself on the LocalAg, platform, you and the buyer chatting backwards and forwards on the app? Or did you go through the sales team member through that?

Wade Alexander 24:10

Look, some of it’s gone through sales team, and then some of it’s just been an inquiry on the LocalAg, yeah. And it because it’s new, yeah, you don’t know, and the reason why I’d rather market hay through – and I’ve got nothing against classifieds in a Country Life – but you’ve got no idea who you’re dealing with. And I’d hate to see a B double load of double A grade lucerne go to someone that I have no idea if they’re going to pay for it or not. Because, you know, it’s difficult to invoice when you’re selling it tonnage, you know, it’s got to go over a bridge, and then it’s on its way to the customer. So you’re on a wing and a prayer. At least through a marketing team like yourselves, there is a little bit of security… quite a lot of security, actually. And then through the LocalAg, that security was still there. You know, unless you know where the person lives, and you go around with a big stick, you don’t know when you’re going to get your money. And when you’re in a situation where you just, you don’t have, you know, a great pool of cash there sitting, you know, waiting for that moment where you got no income, you rely on that invoice being paid.

Steve Page 25:18

And the losing that, even just, you know, a portion of a load is so much of the cream off the top of the crop too. You know, you may only, you may not, get paid for 15-20, bales out of a cut of 500 but it’s that cream on the top. It’s a huge percentage of that profit from that cut.

Wade Alexander 25:36

So, yeah. Well, not only that, I look at a B double load of hay that leaves the grid. And I just think, well, there’s that power bill paid. You know. It’s if I don’t get paid, well, how can I pay for that power bill? I get power cut off, or whatever. So, or, you know, there might be an insurance bill due, and so, yeah, it’s certainty of payment. And I think, you know, I’m not saying there’s, I mean…times are tough, and I understand that. And when you’re dealing with new customers, you there is a little… you know, you are uncertain. But, yeah, I mean, if you’re new to the to the hay marketing or the hay selling or reaching out to someone that’s got experience in it is far better than trying to feel around the dark, you know. And for that, for the small amount, you know, it’s yeah, it’s worth it.

Steve Page 26:33

So just quickly there, you talk about insurance, you know, you’ve had the floods, you’ve had the storms, and we just sort of looking at, you know, what insurances people do have and that on farms, how are you covered with your hay side of things? Are you covered with your shed? Are you covered with your hay in the shed? Or, how are you covered? And how are you getting on with your insurance company?

Wade Alexander 26:57

Yeah, so we haven’t had a claim, really, so no shed fires, thankfully. Must be doing something right. And I don’t use inoculant all the time, mind you. I only use it at this time of the year because it’s hard. But that’s one question they ask. Is your hay being inoculated? And do you have any way of testing your hay for moisture? Well, yes, I’ve got moisture sensor on the baler, and we feed test all our hay, so we know exactly what it’s doing, where it is. So they insure the sheds that the hay is in, and then we insure the hay crop in the shed as well. So it’s normally insured at a market rate. We nominate what we insure it for. Let’s say we got 1000 bales in that shed. At, you know, $250 a bale. Well, that’s what we insure it at. And obviously, that the sheds are insured for… I mean, they’re all relatively new sheds, so we’ve got to insure them for, you know, like for like and you know, it’s not cheap. But we found out during the storm, when we lost all those sheds and we got hay wet, it was well and truly worth it. Because we got sheds rebuilt, and we got pay payment on hay that was damaged, you know, through no fault of our own. And I mean, at the time, we had it all contracted to Feed Central, so, you know, and then Feed Central had to go and find hay that wasn’t, you know, had to buy hay from someone else. So, yeah, if there’s a sacrifice to be made on something else, so you can pay an insurance bill, well, it’s peace of mind. To me, it’s worth doing. (Steve) It’s reducing that risk factor again. (Wade) Yeah, and, I mean, I can understand, you know, like we haven’t had to make a claim (touch wood) on any hay shed fires. But who’s to say that when we’ve got bushfires around here, there’s an ember that floats into the shed. It may not purely be because of a high moisture bale. It might be completely out of your control. And that’s whether it’s a storm or a bushfire, and an ember floating into your shed and lighting your hay up – that’s got perfectly good moisture levels – through no fault of your own. But you know that’s, that’s what sort of… yeah, I think about that.

Steve Page 29:09

Yeah. All right, thanks Wade. That was fantastic. It’s lovely to catch up with you again, and again, congratulations on your awards.

Wade Alexander 29:14

Thanks, Steve, yeah, and thanks for coming out and seeing us. And like you say, 10 years, and, yeah, we’ve learned. I think I’ve learned a lot from you too, because you travel and see all parts of Australia and how other people produce hay, and then you pass that information on to me and, you know, I consider it. You know, you’re a wealth of knowledge, because you’ve seen different areas grow hay in a different way. But, you know, I can take a bit of that and put into my practice too, which helps me develop.

Steve Page 29:50

Look, I’m very fortunate in the number of growers I do catch up with and the different regions and the different climatic conditions right around Australia. And what you do here, may not, or may work for other people. And it’s great to do this opportunity with these podcasts, to try and spread some of that information to other growers too and help them. Because the better hay, the better quality hay, and everything that we produce, and the better marketing we can do for it, and getting people, as you say, those buyers who come in and buy that hay, if they can be making money off that, then all it does is push this industry forward.

Wade Alexander 30:28

So yeah, and you’ve got contacts too. And you know, if I’m having, if I’m struggling, trying to, like, what’s going wrong here? You know, you say, well, I’ll give you a number of this bloke, and he might be able to help you out, or when you’re down here, visit him and so, you know, like, I’ll get help. (Steve) I’ve given your number out a few times. (Wade) I don’t know why, but no, it’s, um, yeah. Like you say that everyone faces different challenges in their area, in their prospective area, and, you know, and I’m relatively only, you know, a prickle farm compared to most of your good growers, and I appreciate that. But we’re all doing our bit. I think, you know, we’re all having a go. We’re all trying to make it work. Yep, we’re all trying to produce a product that that has an end result and produces an end result.

Steve Page 31:11

And every farmer contributes. So everyone who’s making hay goes off to someone else to make something from that hay. So it’s, you know, 10 little fellas makes one big fella type thing. But it’s those 10 little fellas that are spreading the risk and getting that product out to the buyers.

Wade Alexander 31:28

Absolutely. And, you know, what can someone else gain from that?

Steve Page 31:32

Yeah, yeah. And it’s lovely to see the young ones coming through in the industry too. And as I say, using these podcasts to assist them to go on, hopefully for 10, 15, 20 years themselves in the hay industry. So yeah, thanks Wade.

Thank you for listening to the Hay Matters podcast. If you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast or getting your brand in front of our national audience of 20,000 plus farmers, growers and agribusinesses, get in touch with the team at Feed Central to find out how.

This podcast is proudly presented by Feed Central and LocalAg. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes.