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ISSUE 41
Making the most of the wet
K-Line Ag’s machines “Pretty much sell themselves!” says Terry Wilcox of Farmers Centre 1978, Lake Grace.
T wo recent seasons of above- average rainfall has Western Australia’s wheatbelt farmers in a buoyant mood. At Lake Grace, 300km south-east of Perth, demand for new machinery is skyrocketing at the Farmers Centre 1978 dealership, where K-Line Ag’s range has been highly sought-after. “We’re going gangbusters with them. K-Line Ag has actually become quite an important part of our business,” says sales consultant Terry Wilcox, after the dealership recently took over the local franchise for Australian- made K-Line Ag products. The unusually wet conditions have not only put much-needed moisture back into the soil, but also a spring in the step of the region’s farmers. “Normally it’s one in 10 years like that for WA, and we’ve just had two in a row,” Wilcox says. “A year or so before that, the dams were dry and people were cleaning them out, which hasn’t happened for about 25 years in this region. Then we had two awesome seasons that should really set up a lot of
farms for the next 20 or 25 years.”
minds, WA farmers continue to stare down a number of other issues, from fluctuating grain prices and rising input costs to cessation of live sheep exports, indigenous land rights, climate change, and even an uptick in mice activity. “There’s a lot going on,” Wilcox says. also enthusiastically embracing technology to ensure they can continue to maximise their productivity. However, his customers are “A lot of the younger generation of farmers coming up now, we’re doing a lot of work extensively with field mapping, getting boundaries in, and farming smarter,” Wilcox says. “We’re doing a lot of variable rate mapping now. That has suddenly come right to the forefront. And machine connectivity, knowing what your machines are doing. “It’s getting a lot more integrated and we’re working a lot closer with our customers to plan services around them, so we’re keeping downtime to a minimum.”
Although sorely needed, the abnormally wet conditions created extra issues for the mostly broadacre farms around the Lake Grace area, such as sourcing heavy-duty machinery to repair washouts. Some also took the opportunity to plant canola, which requires reincorporation back into the soil. As a result, the Farmers Centre 1978 team has been taking orders several months in advance predominantly for the 12.5-metre and 15.5-metre versions of K-Line Ag’s versatile Speedtiller Powerflex®, plus the handy Trackattack® wheel track renovator. “They pretty much sell themselves,” Wilcox says of the popular Speedtiller® range. “You get them to the farm and you’re there for an hour or two, doing a bit of tuning to make sure the machine is tracking properly and the cut is doing what it needs to be doing. Then away you go, and you don’t hear from them again until they need a set of discs.”
Whilst good rainfall has eased many
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