Take home messages:

1. Be organised, buy your seed now.

2. Grow the crop that suits your needs.

3. Summer crops need just as much care as a winter crop. With record rainfall during the 2005 winter across much of the great southern and south coast regions of Western Australia, winter crops may not have been sown or established very poorly. In other paddocks, an extended period of waterlogging can favour the growth of ryegrass over winter crops so that a total knockdown (crop and all) is a salvage option to prevent the huge build up in weed seed reserves (particularly if they are herbicide resistant). If your winter crop fails for any of these reasons, then a summer crop could be grown in its place. Ask yourself what you want from this summer crop: cash, feed grain, summer/autumn feed or simply water use. This is an important question because it will determine what you grow. If you are going to grow a grain crop, consider where you will sell it and if you have access to on-farm storage to take advantage of significant market peaks during the year.

If you are going to sow extensive areas, prearrange a contract if possible. Agronomy Rotation Your rotation for the following winter will be affected by your choice of summer crop and its time of sowing. While September/October sown White French millet is often ready to harvest by the end of March, sorghum and sunflowers can be later, especially if late rains occur. This extension into autumn can delay the sowing of canola, especially if the summer crop has done its job and dried the topsoil. South coast farmers use crop desiccants or swath, plant early, and use shorter maturing varieties to avoid summer crop harvest encroaching onto winter sowing. An especially important rotation consideration is the disease fusarium head blight or head scab, which is carried by maize, sorghum and the millets. Infected crops do not always show symptoms and the head blight can be passed onto barley and wheat via the stubble of summer crops. This disease is particularly nasty and if it were to establish as a regular problem for winter cereals, it would have significant impacts on our export grain markets. For this reason, wheat or barley should not be sown after these summer crops if their stubble is still present. When sowing into a failed winter crop situation, chemical carry over (particularly Group B chemicals) may limit the choice of summer crop options. Crops grown in this situation have been observed to not grow at all, or tend to be very thin and not vigorous. Soil temperature- go early rather than miss the opportunity Many summer crops have minimum soil temperature requirements at sowing for germination. However, in the south coast region, when soil temperature is ideal, moisture is often compromised. It is preferable to sow early (September, October) rather than wait and miss a good soil moisture opportunity. Trials at Esperance have shown that establishment is unaffected although initial plant vigour is slowed when planted at earlier soil temperature (Table 2).

Despite its preference for 18°C at sowing, even Nutrifeed millet copes well with lower temperatures. If you are thinking of very early sowing then sunflowers, safflower, Japanese millet and White French millet are the most cold tolerant. Remember, the deeper you sow, the colder it is. Seeding rates can be increased to compensate for lower establishment if conditions are not ideal. Row spacing Wider row spacings are necessary for some summer species but the wide skip row configurations used in the Eastern States showed no advantage in WA trials where dry matter and grain yields were lower than narrower spacing (Table 3). Very high rates of production can be achieved with row spacings of 0.5m for sorghum and Nutrifeed. In 2003-04 the peak biomass for these two forages was 5.4 and 6.4t/ha and individual plots of Nutrifeed reached 8t/ha. End of season Delivering a lethal dose of herbicide to forage and grain sorghum requires high rates and a reasonable amount of leaf present. Lower rates or good growing conditions for the sorghum often give only suppression, which some growers may want as this allows the crop to be sown but the sorghum survives to go dormant over the winter and regrow in the spring to give another summer forage. Regrowth grain crops are rare but were trialled in central Queensland where results were cautiously optimistic. If you grow White French millet, then you must swath before harvesting since this millet will shed. Swath this millet when the top third is hard ripe and the bottom third is no longer green and still soft.