11 July 2008
Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry - Tony Burke
Kilto Station owners - Jack and Vicki Burton
Tony: G’day its Tony. It might not look like it but I’m actually out in the Kimberly at the moment, Kilto Station, and here with Jack and Vicki Burton. Now when you first—how long you been at Kildo station now?
Vicki: Over 10 years—15 years.
Tony: And when you started, it’s largely a cattle property now, what was it when you when you first came here?
Vicki: It was an abandoned property when we first came, a cattle property, and we found water and grew fruit and veg, grew sweet potatoes mainly for the Perth market and developed it up.
Tony: And when did you start making the transition back to turning into a cattle property?
Vicki: We always had a small amount of cattle didn’t we.
Jack: Yeah
Vicki: But then probably about 2000, 2001 we made a big change.
Jack: Yes it’s a pretty small property so it was virtually an unviable cattle property and so we were forced to diversify, look at other opportunities rather than just running some cattle in the middle of nowhere, so we sort of expanded and got into the irrigated stuff.
Tony: Ok, now can you explain we’re on an irrigated patch here obviously but we’ve got the pivot behind us, how how big is it?
Jack: These pivots are about 30 hectares so they’re centre pivots, there’s a lot of them round Australia. It’s all ground water so all of our water comes from below ground. There’s sort of, we have we have about six or seven of these at the moment and they’re all growing different crops. Basically this one is a sorghum crop and it’s been cut about four week’s ago for cattle fodder and we use that for our live export yard facility here in back at the homestead.
Tony: So how many of the pivots have you got?
Jack: There’s seven operating pivots yeah and we’re sort of hoping to get a couple more in that’ll be, it’ll keep us busy for a while. And, yeah, so some are growing [inaudible] grass, some are oats, winter oats, not really the spot to grow oats but this time of year it’s perfect.
Tony: And how many head are you running?
Jack: The actual station is only small, it only runs about 1000 head of cattle on the actual the station side of it but the irrigated area we can be feeding anything up to 5000 cattle off this off these 7 pivots.
Tony: Ok. And how much, like for this area that this pivots on, how many cattle would have been able to feed off this area before you started it as an irrigated patch?
Jack: [inaudible] using the Ag Department figures which is you know the basically the rule of thumb, would be that in this land type on this type of land undeveloped you would run one cow.
Tony: One.
Jack: One.
Tony: Ok.
Jack: If you could find her.
Tony: What do you see as the future for the north, there’s been a lot of talk about it, particularly with how dry it’s been down south.
Jack: Yeah look I honestly, the dryness down south, as much as it’s a big negative to the south, we’re loving it because it’s actually focussing people on the north. We’ve been sort of the poor cousins in the north, I suppose, that haven’t had a lot of interest sort of shown. But we think you know, look you see what we sort of done, taken some pretty ordinary cow to—well I think it’s half a cow actually—half a cow to 30 odd hectares and converted that into something like this and we see a massive opportunity. Look it’s, the people are here, the keenness is here, and the resources are here in abundance, the climate’s magnificent you know it’s the middle of July and this is bloody beautiful so I think we see potential to do some serious expansion of this type of activity and the luxury of doing it in 2008 when we’ve got virtually the failures and the stuff ups from the south. And I think there’re some huge opportunities to be had, and some some great sort experiences what to do and what not to do in other parts of Australia.
Tony: One of the things that’s often mentioned when we hear people suggesting agriculture up in the north is they say you can grow a thousand things here but there’s a million things that’ll eat it. How do you go with your pests, your disease your weeds?
Jack: Yeah but the biggest thing is one of their million are humans. But look, it’s 2008 you know, it’s not 1960 when we’re doing cotton in the Ord you know. We’re a little bit smarter, a bit wiser, technology is a little bit better. There’s definitely look a million things and a million hassles and dramas to do something like, this but there’s nothing that’s not fixable or curable or with a bit of foresight you you can alleviate most of your problems. Having an open mind is the biggest asset you can have in this area.
Tony: Ok terrific
Jack: Excellent
Tony: Jack and Vicki… thank you
Jack: Excellent, no worries, excellent no, a bloody pleasure.