Boolah builds the buzz with second field day + PICS

Perth-based InterGrain barley breeder David Moody (centre) with Victorians Trevor Perryman, Kardinia Group Consulting, and Mallee farmer James Rickard, Curyo were among the interstate attendees at the 2025 Boolah event held in Pallamallawa.

A UNIVERSE is building around Boolah’s trial farm, and it went on display on Wednesday at its second annual field day.

This was despite seriously wet conditions preventing around 400 attendees from getting an in-field look at Australia’s largest commercial-scale regenerative trials on Dimboola, Boolah’s home farm east of Moree NSW near Pallamallawa.

Instead, trial participants spoke about their products and involvement in Boolah’s trials in the Pallamallawa War Memorial Hall where, as planned in the event of dry weather also, two panels tackled the day’s theme of Dirt to Data.

Growing in every way

Boolah has been running trials around farming sustainably and profitably since 2021 in a system it calls Regen4real, which has grown into a 72-metric framework built in line with global standards to help reduce emissions in grain production, and influenced by the requirements of Asahi Beverages, supplied by Boolah through the PURE Grain network.

Boolah’s trial sites at Dimboola, and also at the nearby Popinguy farm, involve conventional inputs of starter fertiliser and urea in selected plots, as well as inputs with much lower carbon footprints.

Repeat trial inputs including Terra Firma’s poultry manure pellets, Mort & Co’s granulated cattle manure, Loam Bio’s inoculum, and Omnia’s biologicals.

Among the newcomers to Boolah trials this year are Nuseed with four varieties of canola and one of carinata, and Dunder-Tech’s Dunder N-Rich, made in Bundaberg from dunder, a byproduct of the sugar and ethanol industries.

“This is our first step into broadacre; we’re already doing 5 million litres from June to December…and that’s going into horticulture and sugarcane,” Dunder-Tech principal Tim O’Dea said prior to his presentation.

Two of the most exciting developments for Boolah this year are having the Grains Research and Development Corporation come on board as a sponsor, and the establishment of its first trials outside New South Wales.

These five trials are taking place at the Henderson family’s farm at Wilkur in the northern Wimmera in Victoria, with “more to come”, according to PURE Grain’s head of R&D Brooke Sauer, with a site in Western Australia now being sought.

Guided by barley

Through the PURE Grain Network, Boolah has a line of sight to the consumer, and is committed to reducing its emissions by 30 percent by 2030 over the decade, and reaching net zero by 2050.

Whether those achievements in the long term generate a premium for Boolah grain, or buffer a discount, is yet to be seen, but the company is conducting commercial-scale as well as plot trials to find out what works with reduced emissions in mind.

“The trial farm is a way for us to find out pathways,” Ms Sauer said.

“We are pushing boundaries in a way that has never been done before.”

“We have 278 treatments across 19 trials covering just shy of 1700ha this year.”

She said the trials give Boolah building blocks of information with which to build its pathway, which involves different treatments in varying rates, and in different combinations.

In addition to barley, canola, and carinata, crops grown in trials are: wheat; faba beans; chickpeas, and sorghum.

Boolah is annually cropping around 26,500ha for itself and others in northern NSW, and in 2024, 78pc of its barley made malt selection.

Stuart Tighe.

Since 2021, Boolah has supplied around 200,000t of barley to BBM for malting for Asahi Beverages.

Boolah Farms founder and PURE Grain Network chief executive officer Stuart Tighe told Wednesday’s gathering that Dirt to Data was chosen as the theme in the lead-in to mandatory reporting on ESG credentials.

“It’s about what we should be recording that we haven’t necessarily done in the past, and what we can get out of that data that we haven’t in the past,” Mr Tighe said.

“I reckon it’s a new era.”

“Once you get your head around it, there will be value in it.

“If we don’t, there’s nothing worse than being told what to do and how to do it.”

The Pallamallawa War Memorial Hall and the adjacent covered area filled up with around 400 attendees in town for the 2025 Boolah Trial Farm Field Day.

The Henderson family from Wilkur in Victoria’s northern Wimmera is hosting commercial-scale trials on their farm, and brothers Mitch and Dan Henderson, pictured with Milguy farmer Ruffy Tonkin (centre), were among the Victorians who made the trip to Pallamallawa for the 2025 field day.

Loam Bio’s Phil Peterson, Dan Reid and Rob Hulme with the FurrowMate direct air injection unit now available and designed to apply biologicals at seeding.

Tim O’Dea and son Connor from Dunder-Tech, a Bundaberg company which enhances a byproduct of the sugar industry into an organic liquid fertiliser, and is involved in trials at Boolah.

Zero Net Emissions Agriculture CRC’s Professor Richard Heath, Mort & Co’s Ben Carrigan, GRDC’s Craig Baillie, Asahi Beverages’ Cameron Wilson, and Barrett Burston Malting’s Philip Robinson on stage with event MC and Boggabilla farmer John Woods.

B&W Rural Moree agronomists Brad Donald and Sophie O’Neill with Sundown Pastoral Company sustainability analyst Fenella Cassegrain, Moree.

Precision Planting’s David McGavin, Inverell, and Moree accountant David Newnham.

Livestock producers Scott Glasser, Goondiwindi, and Greg Tighe, Guyra.

Panelists Professor David Lamb, Food Agility CRC, Ed Jones, PCT Agcloud, Ailie Webb, NSW DPIRD, Emma Weston, AgriDigital, and Lee Coleman, Farm Simple, fielded questions on data.