Mother Nature, The Bad Weather Continue with 4X4 Off Road

The Weather must be playing a joke on us. It continued to rain, heavily. The rain had soften up the soil. Experiencing lots of topple over of plants in our Rubber plantation, Parcel 1, 2, 3 and 6. The rain also cause pressure on over access roads within our plantation. Soil erosion, water running off the road, causing heavy erosion. 
After doing our weed management for Parcel 1, 2 & 3, were doing our round on 14th July, this was a very memorial day. Our adventure started early in the morning. Our plan was brought forward (from 16th July as the weather forecast was favorable for 16th) to today as our helpers had ran out of food supplies. Our chore was simple, send in food supplies to our helper in Parcel 1, collect our equipment, spraying pumps and bush cutters, proceed to Parcel 6 and clear some weeds along the terrace.

The Slope taken on a sunny day.

Access to Parcel 1 is pretty straight forward  as road are in the process of being upgraded. The bad section is about the last few kilometers to our plantation. Our helper had locked up the store and went off to work in Parcel 3. Our Hilux got stuck at the middle of the up hill slope. The steep gradient at the lower right of the picture. We couldn't make a u turn and had to reverse all the way down the muddy & slippery slope. Jamming the brake is of no use as the tires are slipping like if you were on butter. Note we are already using knobby off road tires. Slide in to the side drain, on the hill side to control our decent. Finally made it to the bottom.
After collecting our equipment, we travel though the back road to Parcel 6. These roads are connecting road, between Palm Oil estate, ex logging track and some not too bad tracks public tracks. We had to transverse very slowly as it had been a while since I've used this road. Again we slide to the side, hitting the banks of the slope during a couple of descend. This time it's not too bad as there are banks on both sides. We managed to reach Parcel 6 in the early afternoon. Parked the truck by the road side and proceed with our work. By mid day as we were working deeper into our plantation, drove the Hilux down to our shed as the ground had dried up. Continued with our work.
Then came a sudden down pour at about 2.30 pm. We didn't have time to drive our Hilux back to the main track, which is just about 500 meters. We got stuck at the slope with high incline. We made lots of tries under the heavy rain. Then we heard some lorry noise and ran out to the main road, seeking help. They 5 ton lorry carrying palm seed is also stuck and had slip to the bank, blocking half the road. Found out from the driver that another 4X4 5 ton truck is on the way. Unfortunately, it also got stuck next to the 1st truck, making it impassable. They called for help and a heavily modified Hilux was send. Manage to pull out the 4x4 5 ton truck but not the 1st truck. They then decided to form a train, the 4x4 tuck, pulling the Hilux, then pulling the 1st 5 ton truck. Managed to free the 1st truck after many tries. The 2 truck left as they were heavily loaded and wouldn't want to go risk going down the slope again. With the power heavily modified Hilux equipped with huge knobby mud tires & winch, all of us figured that it should be an easy job as our truck was just lightly loaded.

Unfortunately our access road was too narrow, muddy, slippery and angled wrongly, slanting toward the cliff side. The Hilux gave up after 4 tries as it was slipping toward the cliff side and the driver feels it's too dangerous. He too has difficulty getting back to the main track as his truck keep slipping.

Had no choice but to abandon our truck. Trek out about 2 kilometers to the tared road to wait for our partner to take us home. While waiting, we chance upon another Toyota Land Cruiser (HZJ79), deems as the 4X4 work horse. It house a 4,200 cc diesel engine. Again we went in hoping to free our truck. The driver deem it to be too dangerous as it's still raining too muddy, slippery and angled towards the cliff. Suggested to wait till the ground dries up before attempting.

Abandoning out truck for the second time. We went home, totally wet, tired and feeling dejected. Our hope is to wait for the ground to dry up in a day or so. Then try again.

 Next day, which is a Sunday, manage to get a friend to help. A heavily modified Hilux, latest model, with a winch. The rain had stopped at dawn, ground had dried slightly, but still slippery. We waited till mid day. The Hilux manage to dislodge us from the slope with it's winch. Problem came when the Hilux was trying to reverse out. It nearly fell off the cliff side 3 times. Use our truck as an anchor to winch itself back onto the track as there were no large tree in the correct position. Each time, pulling us along as the track is still very slippery.

Agfer aligning the Hilux, we used spades and cangkor, to level slightly the track, hoping that it would not make the vehicle slip off the cliff side. We then chance upon another Toyota Hilux on the main track and requested his help to pull out the heavily modified Hilux. The Hilux made it out on it's own this time after leveling the track. It also used the bank side as a guide.

All of us made it out, back to the tared road. It is my first heavy duty 4X4 off road adventure. It was Man & Machine verses Nature & Weather. What a day! Experience gained in using winch and recovery of stranded vehicle. This is what real adventure is like, not like those planned trips with lots of backup vehicles and equipment.

The section where the 2 trucks were stuck.

The section where we were stuck.

We went back the next day to complete our work. As it was raining the whole night till dawn, we dare not risk driving down the incline even on the main track. This time we parked at the top and trek down the main track to Parcel 6. Had finished off trimming the weeds on Parcel 6. Shall need to drop by again next week to administer herbicide. Hopefully the weather shall improve by then.

The section where our rescuer almost fell off the track to the cliff side on the right.

Mother Nature, The Weather 2.

We had our "last" pump for irrigation on the 4th July. Our pond had fallen to too low a level for the pump to pump up, even after moving the pump to the lowest possible location.
The weather started to change abruptly. Rain started to break on the 5th July. It has been raining almost nightly. Now it even rained twice in a day.

Both our ponds is at the maximum level. Initially the secondary pool experienced an algae boom. Since the gravity pipe in water is back in service, decided to fill up the main pond, which then run off to this secondary pond. It cleared up after 2 days.

After raining almost nightly, our Parcel 5 is too wet and the ground id giving way. We already had a couple of fallen bananas, papayas and plenty spoiled seedlings of papaya and ginger.

Let's hope the weather shall stabilize, goes back to normal soon so that we can continue with our new planting.
We need to rectify the run off pipe for the main pond as we had set it too high. It shall be quite tedious as we need to dig it out again. Shall make time for this.

Mother Nature, the weather.

This is the first drought since taking over the farm full time and finding it a big challenge. Even though am anticipating it, we still have difficulties as at now.

 

We started off our preparation by shoring up the main pond, thinking of keeping a higher reserve of water. Then we clean up the water kangkongs (see older posting Start Of The Dry Season). We then proceed to fire up the water pump, which had been redundant for the past few months. Did a general servicing like changing the engine oil, spark plug, clean the air filter & etc. Upon running, we find the pressure built up is a bit low and plenty of air bubbles.  The fault was traced to the leaky in-take hose. Cost is high for these type of hose as it is non-collapsible. Had it replaced with a new hose. We felt so confident after preparing all these and waited for the dry season to come.

 

Unfortunately our timing was a bit out as we were unable to fill our main pond fully before the drought came. This time, it came covering a much bigger area.

Our water sources consist of pipe in gravity water that we share with our neighbors’, there is a small creek that runs across our little farm. From this creek, we had dug 2 water retention ponds. Another well at our neighbor’s land. We managed to get last year. What we did was that we use the pipe in water to fill our retention ponds. The pipe in water is from a small river a couple of kilometers away.

With more than 23 days of no rain in between, our creek had dried up. The well had dried up. The river, water is getting less and it cannot create a pressure to reach us as we are at the end of the pipe and could be at a high level.

 

The pump was shifted lower and closer to the pond as the suction power is insufficient. Due to the water shortage, we quickly put up a shade for our Avocado seedlings.

 

The shade is a D70, meaning that it is suppose to block off 70% of the sun light. With the strong sun light I think it may not be sufficient. Maybe should had gone for D90.

Had been checking on the weather forecast daily, expecting rain in the coming week. Let’s hope it arrive in time. Stay tune to see if we manage to get by this drought.

Agriculture Sun Shade Netting

Start Of The Dry Season

 Took some time to repair our water retention pond. Repaired the water outlet so that it can hold more water reserve. Clean out the water Kangkong which had overcrowded the pond.









Our cleaned water pond. Found that the fishes that we had put in had grown. Getting some feed for them. Maybe we can do a harvest in a couple of months.







Checked out the water pump as it was redundant for the past months. Changed the engine oil, clean spark plugs. Did a test run, but find that there is a lot of air trapped inside. Problem was traced to the leaky suction hose. Suction hose is costly as it has to withstand the negative pressure without collapsing. 








Guess we are all set for the dry season.

Big Changes At Our Little Farm

This month we had a big changes to our little farm. One of our pioneering founder had decide to call it a day and opted out. He has rendered us tremendous help in setting our farms, especially parcel 1, 2 and 3. We couldn't had start off without him.

I had currently stepped in to take up the challenge of running the set up.  After two years of retirement, getting back to work is rather tiring. On the bright side, I get to do more exercise and am slimming down to I guess maybe 75 kilos. Doing farm work, I should be able to build up my stamina and muscles.

Starting off with Parcel 5, our little 4 acres experimental farm. After lengthy discussion with our helpers, to find out their confidence on the type of crops, and also with the seeds that we still have in our store, we had decided to concentrate on Brinjals, Lady's fingers, Sweet Corn, Chillies and Pumpkins. These shall be our main crops at the moment, as we do not want to be too diversified. We are also salving the existing crops like Avocados, Banana, Nangka, Serai, Ginger, Yam and also some papayas that we had just planted. We are also experimenting with some Bitter gourd, seeds that we already have. I guess we shall save more time salvaging, rather than planting a new. We are also ending our green vegetable runs, by finishing off the maybe 15 beds that we current have due to too low a market price, too much work (labor intensive) and constantly harvesting & replanting. We are shifting from Plant & Plant (plant more, hope many grows and produce) from the previous management to Planting, Caring & Marketing. I guess we were moving forward too fast, planting previously and not spending much time on caring. This new strategy shall emphasis new Planting of crops with less labor intensive, Caring for all existing crops ( watering /insect /disease /fertilizer management) and Marketing so that we are in tune with the market.

 The first two weeks, we had manage to identified the disease and insects attack on our plants. We are glad that we now know at least how to handle it. Once it's under controlled, we shall proceed to experimenting with fertilizing. Being Agriculture, it takes a while to see the results (good or bad) from your testing. We had lots of external help from a good friend Micheal. Moving on to Fertilizing shall include Organic, inorganic and effective microbes. Organic shall be in the form of Chicken dung, with nutrients and trace elements for long term fertilizing. Commercial fertilizer NPK, for faster in soil  fertilization. We are also experimenting with foliar fertilizer. Re-initiating theEffective Microbes that were proven to be very effective. On the marketing, we are targeting the coming Raya, 2nd week of November with some of our produce. Hope to have a sell out.

With these fine tuning, we hope to hit our objective, which is short term, we hope to arrest the negative cash flow by end February 2012. Long term objective is to experiment with crops, learning to plant and take good care of the crops to produce commercial grade harvest, identify the suitable crops and duplicate it at the rubber plantation on a bigger scale. Elevate the standard of living for everyone that is involve in this project. This way we can manifest more life, by producing more food to feed the world.
Stay tune for more updates on the rest of the farms.

Water

Importance of water In Agriculture.

Water is very important in agriculture. Never take it for granted. When we started our farm, we went on to check out the creek with some neighbors, and were told that it never dries up. This creek runs across our farm diagonally. We also did a pipe-in water from the hills quite a distant away with a 50 mm hdpe pipe. Things were running well up till end July. We had converted 1 acres (out of 4) to plant vegetables that requires lots of water daily. While expanding the 1 acre, the dry spell came and it did not rained for a period of 3 weeks. The small creek start to dry up. We estimated the volume of input from the creek is not sufficient for our use. Our first option is to use our pipe-in water. As it was from quite a far distance, and incidentally there were some road works and water pipe laying works being carried out at the same time. These cause plenty of disruption on the pipe-in water supply. It was unreliable. We had up to 6 days without pipe-in water. This cause quite a numbers of seedlings to died off. Those that survive are stunt, and have difficulty of recovering. Our second option was to save whatever possible and we use our water sparingly. We then engaged a tractor to dig three wells along the creek and one well on our neighbor's land. Luckily we strike underground water at our neighbor's land. It was fine for a while. We also used the pipe-in water to fill up the well at the creek. Unfortunately, part of the cliff eroded and block off the underground water inlet. Water level was recovering too slowly for our usage (as we have extended till 2 acres of vegetable). We then reverted to the wells at the creek. We have sufficient water for the moment, but we are only planting 2 out of 4 acres of our farm. Our option now is to plant plants that requires less water. We have 4 wells to rotate so we feel that we should be good for a stretch of three weeks of no / intermittent rain. We then proceed to plant out our remaining land. Things turned out well for us, as the rain came on the evening of 11th September. It's raining daily mostly in the late evening or night. We are so grateful to the weather and the weather forecast people. A big Thank You.

Planting Corn, not as easy as I think.

Planting Corn, I thought was easy. After my first failure of planting sweetcorn, I did more research and found more information that prepare me more, for my next trial.

Current planting technology involve lots of new technology and data. Weather plays a very important role as with any activities. Knowing the weather trend helps to reduce planting risk and increase yield. Long time ago, some clever planters devised a 'Planting Calender'. I was told these planting times had some how been incorporated into the Chinese calender. Planting calender, being geographically based, shall differs from location to location. I am still trying to find our local planting calender. Other factors affecting the calender most is the climate changes that we are currently experiencing. Another is the kind of hybrid that we intend to plant. The seeds that I had bought has a maturing date ranging from 45 to 78 days (am sure that there were no hybrids during those hay days).
Weather Forecast and trend for Keningau

Planting distance. Corn are preferably planted in blocks of minimum 100 to be effectively pollinated. As these are wind pollinated, there is a higher chances of pollination in blocks rather than in (just) rows. The optimum planting distance differs from location to location and types of seeds, it varies from 6 to 20 inches and 20 to 40 inches between rows. Planting depths also varies from 0.5 to 2 inches.

Land and soil. Land preparation, do a soil test to find out the soil condition. This is something that we had never done (village style). Plow the soil to a minimum of about 6 inches. Sweet corns require lots of nitrogen. Use a nitrogen rich fertilizer. Condition needs to be moist and hot for good germination (easy part). Found a cheap PH meter.

Next comes the weeding control. During the flowering stage, make sure the weeds are short. This shall secure higher pollination. Lots of sunshine, some water and some fertilizer. Wait for Harvest.