Caption : South Australian grower Henry Schutz, Eudunda, runs a H4 Reefinator contracting business that stretches west to Yorke Peninsula, north to Yacka and east to the Victorian Goldfields, Goulburn and Macedon Ranges regions.
AFTER a run of dry years, the Schutz family in South Australia’s Mid North added a contracting business to their farm enterprise for some top-up income. Now they are spending several months on the road to keep up with the workload.
Henry Schutz farms with his parents, Roger and Alison, at Eudunda, as well as at Australian Plains, situated on the State’s Goyder’s Line, while they also have a property at Booborowie, where Alison grew up.
Henry said the contracting business centred on “reefinating” rocky land with their Rocks Gone H4 C (contractors’ edition) Reefinator machine, while they also offered stone picking, as well as hay services closer to home.
The family crops 1200 hectares and first saw a demonstration of a Reefinator at Caltowie before investing in the later model H4 machine in 2022.
The 3-metre wide Reefinator comprises a levelling blade, four front row and five rear row hydraulic tines, and a following ribbed drum, all weighing 28.5 tonnes when filled with water and digging up to 600 millimetres deep.
The machine was put to work in shallow limestone and sedimentary slate country at their Eudunda property, targeting increased cropping yields, but the priority had since become the contracting work.
“There is a lot of ‘prep’ work and a bit of a job afterwards with a prickle chain, harrows or rolling it, but we did a paddock in between rains last year,” Henry said.
“We’ve tackled some of the worst on our own property and it’s brilliant to now work through the rocky outcrops. There’s some more work to be done, but we can now run the seeder from one fence to the other.
“Where we’ve hit the sheet limestone, it’s really paying off. There were ute size patches everywhere, whereas now the paddock’s as even as a carpet and we’ve gained the investment dollars back by achieving consistent yields across the paddock, which you see in cereals the most.
“The bank initially didn’t lend to us based on the contracting. They did it on the basis of us growing an extra 1-2 bags (per acre) and we have easily gained that where we have done it.
“We have also done some deep ripping with the Reefinator, by folding the front four tines up and using the back five tines, and we got far deeper ripping in the second year. In pasture, you could see the (difference in the) sheep feed in the rip marks, and the crop also was better in the ripped area.”
The Schutz Reefinator Contracting work has taken Henry west to the Yorke Peninsula, north up to Yacka, and he has spent plenty of time in Victoria in the Goldfields, Goulburn and Macedon Ranges regions, where he will be working for a number of months again between harvest and seeding after upgrading their tractor.
“We have a John Deere 9520 scraper special with cushion hitch that sits on 900/60 R42 super singles. It’s 450-horsepower and we bumped it up to 500hp, but the new one is a 560hp John Deere 9560R. The 9520 has done 13,000 hours, so it will be higher horsepower and more comfortable.”
Henry said the eastern work involved three trips, firstly with their Western Star truck with a drop deck and ramps for the H4 Reefinator and then with a ute and caravan before returning again to collect the tractor, however he would be there for three to four months before the new season.
He has tallied up a lot of kilometres in the ute, talking with farmers, viewing rocks and working around rock reefs, and he said on various properties there was a lot more non-arable land than expected.
“Land with sedimentary rock, shaley slate and limestone converts the best. You can’t really touch bluestone, which is volcanic rock, and ironstone and quartz can be hit and miss. But the harder the rock tends to be the better cropping country. It just takes more passes and a bit of work to get it right.”
Henry said contracting clients had reported great results following the “reefinating”.
“Some clients use prickle chains and rollers afterwards and they have sown lentils straight into it and the benefits are there.”
“A good client at Pinery (SA) has done hundreds of hectares of sheet limestone. It looked ugly, but after using a prickle chain and harrows, they grew 800 kilograms/ha more lentils on the reefinated ground compared to the rest of the paddock. That was also generally the poorer ground and it was with one pass. We did a second pass to tidy it up a bit more prior to seeding this year.
“It’s a good return on the contracting investment and they have since bought poorer blocks in the district and will ‘reefinate’ them to pick them up.
“It will open up similar opportunities for us too, on land with heaps of outcrops.”
He said another livestock client in Victoria had reported tremendous results after reefinating 100ha, so much so that they plan to work another 140ha this year.
“It’s increased their stocking rate 10 times, from 0.5 DSE to 5-6 DSE. It’s unreal. You can think this must be bullshit, but it’s happened.”
“It’s absolute goat country that you wouldn’t think about sowing pasture into, but they have and their sheep enterprise has got massive in size. It’s way too steep for anything but sheep and I couldn’t get the Landcruiser up some of it. I had to be very planned and it was a mind-game with the Reefinator, but we did it.
“There’s a 50ac paddock that you couldn’t have stock on and this year it was running 700 stocky lambs and the feed was outdoing the sheep.”
Having clocked 2000 hours with their H4 Reefinator, Henry said he had replaced many points and leading edges due to the tough rock, as well as the silica levels in soils, however the machine was built well and there had been no major problems.
“It’s built in a way that the wear points wear and not a lot else breaks.”
He said their next step would be to add latest automation technology now available with the machine.
Suitable for ISOBUS and GPS-integrated tractors, the Rocks Gone Depth Master system calculates speed over ground and tractor load or wheel slip to adjust machine depth up to 50 times per second, as well as the level of its blade, helping to ease the demands on operators and tractors.
Media information: Rohan Howatson, Howatson PR Communications, on 0407 428 459.