A seeding season buoyed by rain is in the final stages at Badgingarra, with sheep finally starting to pick at green feed, grain crops emerging from the ground and pastures now being planted.

It is Todd Kenny’s sixth year seeding with his father Andrew and grandfather Mike after moving back to the family property in 2018, and conditions this year have been close to perfect.

After starting seeding on May 3, the first major rain for the year — 16mm — came on May 5 at the Kennys’ farm.

The 45mm that fell on June 5 was followed up by 15mm during the three days afterwards, with the family’s commercial seeding program finalised on June 17 and pasture planting now under way.

The Kennys run a 60/40 cropping and sheep operation, planting about 2600ha each year and running about 5500 Merino breeding ewes across another 2000ha at their farm called Rubicon.

With four, full-time workers on the farm, it is a shared effort – with Mike still actively involved with the sheep operation and everyone pitching in to help with both the cropping and the livestock.

For 23 years – as long as Todd has been alive – the family’s farm worker has been on board.

“We are pretty happy with the start we have had,” Todd said.

“Once we had the first rain we have had some good follow up rains, so it has been good conditions to seed into.”

This year’s cropping program included canola, wheat, barley, lupins as commercial crops and oats and seradella for sheep feed on some of the poorer soils.

There were no major changes to the seeding program this year, but the Kennys have found great success after incorporating deep ripping into their farming operation three years ago.

“Our soil has responded well to that, and we’ve really focused on that during the past three years,” Todd said.

“Mouldboarding has fixed our non wetting soils, which was an intensive job for many years, so now that we have finished that its given us more time to be able to focus on ripping and Reefinating.

“We had a lot of trouble with non-wetting soils and it really seems to help.”

A particularly good season last year was dampened a little by water logging, but overall, the family felt they had “nothing to complain about”.

It was a good year for farmers across WA, with a record 26 million tonnes harvested.

“Aside from that (water logging), we really can’t complain at all, it was a profitable year and prices were good,” Mr Kenny said.

“It wasn’t a record for us the last two years, like it was for lots of people out east. But it was good.”

The first major rain for the year came on May 6 at the Kennys’ farm, with 16mm falling making sure their canola got up and running. Good follow up rains have continued to fall since.

Pasture quickly started to germinate, lifting spirits that the farmers would be able to ease up on feeding sheep – with stock finally having their “first nibble” later this month.

It was the first rainfall of more than 10mm recorded since September last year, with no significant summer rain recorded at the property and perennials sitting dormant since being seeded in July.

“Pasture is starting to come up, the sheep are now happy on the green feed,” Todd said.

“We are keen to put some seradella and oats in, we will try to blow out some of the weeds and put something in that is a bit more beneficial to the sheep.”

Todd said he had loved returning to the farm his family have run since 1959, but joked his father was “still the boss”.

“I will give him that,” he joked.

“He does all the spraying and I look after the sheep side… but we all do a bit of everything.”