Farmer climate focus - John Hamparsum

John Hamparsum

Liverpool Plains, NSW

Location snapshot

Catchment:   Upper Namoi Valley, NSW

Altitude:        300 m

Enterprise:    Winter cropping: Durum, bread-wheat and canola
Summer cropping: Cotton and sorghum

Rainfall:        Wet season (Oct-Mar): 61% rainfall
Cool-season (Apr-Sep): 39% rainfall

Seasonal rainfall climate drivers:

El Nino-Modoki (EMI) is the key climate driver, however, little connection exists post-January to May.

Some impact from the Indian Ocean Dipole and SAM during spring in this location - strongly EMI related climate influence

What are your ‘go-to’ sources of climate/weather information? Basically the internet. I’ve got pages of bookmarks of weather sources that I go to. Predominantly for the short-term, ten day kind of stuff, I use Meteorlogixs because of the ability to look at the eight or so different models in there. That gives you an idea of both temperature forecasts and rain forecasts between the models. The Bureau of Meteorology Land and Water is also another one I’ll look at. They both go through various stages of accuracy. The European model, the ECMWF, lately seems to be the most accurate and windy.com is also a very good website. Long-term, I used to read the Bureau forecasts but the last four summers they’ve got every one of them wrong so my faith in that has gone out the window. I mean, they have forecast a wet summer for the last four years and we’ve had record lows. Even this November was a record low month when they were forecasting above average rainfalls. I guess my faith in the BOM is pretty low at the moment, they are going to have to do a lot of work to get their credibility back up to an acceptable level.

How do you consider climate in your farm management? Climate is one of the main factors impacting a farming business. I mean, a farm is a factory without a roof on it. Climate has a major impact, whether it be heat waves, cold spells, dry spells, wet, windy, all of those have an impact on the productivity of your farm. Irrigation does tend to insulate you a little bit, but we, as most irrigators in the northern valleys know, in the last three years we have had no water. I am a member of the Farmers for Climate Action group and I am quite active in that because I believe that our climate is being impacted by climate change and I think that we need to be more proactive in that space, both on individual levels and as a nation and as a planet because climate is basically what will provide food and fibre for generations to come and it’s going to determine the success or failure of being able to supply that. It’s by looking at the long term climate drivers that you make decisions on how you’re going to farm, also with our crop configuration. We use it to make decisions about how much single-skip cotton we will plant versus solid plant irrigated country we will plant. So, we will make a decision asking are we going to cover ourselves by using single-skip which doesn’t use as much water and can handle water stress better and if it’s looking like we are going into a longer dry period we might increase our percentage of single-skip from 25 percent to 35 percent just to hedge our bets.

Can you share a climate success (or failure) story with us? Going back, I remember in 1992 the forecast, from talking to Roger Stone at the time, was that we were going in to a dry pattern with an el Nino and my father and I had the opportunity to put down another irrigation bore and we thought ‘let’s go ahead and do this.’ And it paid off because 1992 right through to ‘96 was incredibly dry and having that extra bore made the big difference to our yields.

How did your winter crops pan out? The sad part about it was that we had very good rain at the early part of establishment and the crop set itself up to be very large, sort of record breaking yield type structure to the plant and then it just stopped raining and we just were not prepared. Even though we had a full storage of water - well we irrigated one field and worked out how much water it was using and decided not to keep going because our confidence we were going to have a wet summer was not strong. So, we decided not to irrigate the rest of the wheat because we might need it for our summer crop and then the wheat crop hit the wall, moisture wise. We didn’t have a completely full profile coming out of the drought, even though we’d had some good rains we probably only had an 85, 90 percent profile. So, when that dry September hit it really capped out the yield in the winter crop.

How is the climate considered in your future planning? My membership to the Farmers for Climate Action group does play a major role but we are only individuals, we can’t influence how whole nations like China and Europe behave, but we can point out to our own government that we need to be taking actions against climate change. Hopefully this, not so much for me but for my children and their children, that will have a positive impact. Looking at some of the modelling I see that the extremes are going to be a lot more amplified. and for us, living on a flood plain, that could mean that the floods could be a lot worse and the dry times could be a lot worse and the strength of the storms and the voracity of them. The way I see it is, like any chemical experiment, the more heat you put in, the more wild the reaction is.

As an early subscriber, what do you value most from AgEcon’s services? I value the breadth of research that AgEcon is providing and interpreting for us. I really feel like I get a far more knowledgeable interpretation of all the models. I find it really useful and a powerful tool to be able to read those reports and listen to podcasts and make heads and tails of what’s happening rather than looking at the trees and seeing if there’s new shoots on them - which I also do.

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