Government Suggests Local Graziers Could Try Hand Spraying This Autumn To Mix Things Up

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

As fuel shortages, whether they be caused by panic buying or a failure of policy, or both, are gripping the regions around the nation ahead of the winter cropping season.

With late summer rains in Queensland and New South Wales especially, millions of acres from Emerald to Echuca could do with a good drink of glyphosate before the main paddock preparation begins later this month into April.

Smaller graziers locally have told The Advocate that they've been harbouring concerns over having enough diesel to spray at the moment, with many paddocks coming up with a variety of weeds such as scotch thistle, potato weed and camel melon to name a few coming up.

One such operator, Mick Tassle of 'Eurama' via Windorah, fears he might do the prep but not have the fuel to sow later on. He expressed there worried to the government, who suggested that he and his fellow farmer friends could mix things up by hand spraying their paddocks over autumn, as some sort of physical challenge akin to a tubby banker taking on an F45 8-week body transformation.

"I mean, it's possible," he said.

"But my knapsack sprayer's fucked, got a big crack in it. But I'd ideally not have to buy any more chemical, so I'll have to use what I have in the shed. So anyway, I'd be using my 5L hand pump my wife uses around the garden. So with that, it'd, uh, be about 50ml of Apparent [Glyphosate 450] in the 5 litres. There abouts anyway. And the Bow Saw, because it's 600g/kg and the rate is so tiny at broadacre scale, for a 5 litre tank you're talking about a fraction of a gram. Like literally a little pinch. Less than the tip of a teaspoon. I'd almost need a jeweller's scales to measure it properly, or otherwise I'd just eyeballing it,"

"Then I'll have to top it up with water from a jerry can on the back of the ute, give it a pump and off I go squirting thistles one by one. Good stuff."

Mr Tassle hopes to have 980ha of mixed cereals in the ground by winter. A hectare of stubble after summer rain might have anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 individual weeds. Working weed by weed with a 5 litre hand pump. Squirt, walk, squirt, pump the pressure back up, walk back to the ute every twenty minutes to mix another batch. You might knock over 10 weeds a minute on a good run. That's roughly 100 hours per hectare. Times 980 hectares, that's 98,000 hours, or about 27 years at 10 hours a day, seven days a week. He'd finish around 2053.

More to come.