“I’ve put Aricks residue managers on my disc seeder, made by BPR Engineering at Corowa.”

“They are basically a wheel that runs in front of the disc coulter that clears the trash out of the way so the coulter can easily cut through.”

He said that while disc seeders were usually reasonable on trash clearance, he had some difficulties last year with ‘hair-pinning’, or retained stubble being pushed into the seed row.

Another change has been to fit new equipment to the back of the header to better distribute the chaff.

“When you think of harvest management, you often think of getting the straw right, but we also had problems with the chaff not being distributed evenly.

“The new fans on the back can blow the chaff out over the width of the header, about 10 metres, whereas previously it was only being spread out over three metres.

“You might not think the chaff would be a big problem, but in a controlled traffic system, we were getting paddocks with three years worth of chaff sitting right in the middle of the rows and the disc seeder was having trouble getting through it at sowing.”

Generally with cereal crops, he leaves straw height as high as the row spacings, so if he is sowing on 30cm spacings, there is 30cm of straw left.

“It’s a rough rule of thumb, sometimes you have other things going on, such as the barley being blown over, and you’ll have to go lower, but that’s what we aim for.”

Mr Adler said stubble retention was a large platform of his cropping enterprise.

“We think the moisture conservation aspect is very important.

“Even last year, where many people decided to burn, I opted to keep the stubble.

“We had that dry spell through late winter and early spring, and I feel that standing stubble can help the crop get through better than if the paddock had been burnt or cultivated

Along with that, he said the crop residue helped improve soil structure as it broke down, and boosted microbial health.

“It’s a bit hard to quantify, as you don’t see any great increases in soil nitrogen or phosphorus or whatever, but the long-term studies show that more of the nutrients become plant available after a while.”

However, it all boils down to pure economics.

“At the end of the day, we do it because there is a yield benefit and it helps us make more money, there has to be that economic response.”