We spent a lovely couple of days at Dowerin at the home of new friends Wendy and John Metcalf. John is a 3rd generation farmer in this area and has now passed the farm on to his son, while still working helping out. During his stewardship he bought up another 3 neighbouring farms to increase the total area now under crop and pasture to 60,000+ ha. John and Wendy were wonderful hosts and took us on a tour around the farm checking out the huge planting, fertilising, and harvesting machinery. We learnt how to tell when the wheat will be ready to harvest and how to estimate crop yield based on how many grains there are per head of wheat. With the crop only a couple of weeks from harvest the biggest worry is frost which will decimate the harvest and result in very low yields. It was really interesting seeing the scale of this farming and the reliance on high tech machinery which runs to millions to purchase and that’s per machine.

The farm is mainly wheat, barley and canola but also sheep as another income stream. The countryside here is magnificent and it’s easy to see why they love living on the land. They were wonderful hosts who gave us electricity and even a high pressure sprayer to wash down poor VanGo after months of red dust. We feel very clean and nice now.