SEPWA

🗂️ Need help in the farm office?

Please join us next Tuesday for EFOM’s next practical farm office session, Help in the Farm Office, the second session in EFOM’s 2026 series.

This session will focus on practical ways to manage the farm office role, including how AI is being used, where a personal assistant or bookkeeper can fit, how families are sharing the role, and how the next generation can be brought into the office over time.

Agenda

How is AI being used in the farm office and where is its main potential?
Dimity Smith, GRO Events

Why a personal assistant was the best fit for my farm office management
Lisa Jeitz

Sharing the role — how a farming family is navigating the office in a partnership
Emma and Megan Graham

How I work with a bookkeeper and why it works
Jane Wandel

Handing over the farm office — bringing the next generation in
Jan Biven

EFOM sessions are designed to support the people managing farm business administration across the Esperance Port Zone, with practical discussion, shared experience and useful tools that can be taken back into the business.

Tuesday 28 July
9:30 am – 12:00 pm
Esperance Civic Centre

We hope to see you there.

💧 Small falls. More water. Better spray-water chemistry.

SEPWA’s dam catchment liner project is building the case for second-hand CBH tarps as a practical, relatively low-cost way to strengthen farm water security.

Earlier monitoring showed the tarped catchments could generate dam inflows from rainfall events as small as 1.5 mm. By comparison, well-maintained roaded catchments generally need around 10–12 mm of rain before generating useful inflow.

New water-quality sampling has shown the tarps may offer a second benefit.

Across five lined and four unlined farm storages, water from lined catchments had lower average pH, bicarbonate, alkalinity, sodium, total dissolved solids, electrical conductivity and chloride. Hardness was low and similar in both lined and unlined storages.

The standout result for growers using dam water for spraying was bicarbonate: lined storages averaged 134 mg/L, compared with 310 mg/L in unlined storages.

That matters because bicarbonate levels above 175 mg/L have been reported to reduce the efficacy of some Group 1 grass herbicides and 2,4-D amine. In this round of sampling, lined storages averaged below that point of concern.

At Mt Ridley, SEPWA is also monitoring a Daisy Dam Cover alongside the tarped catchment — testing a practical water-security proposition: capture more when it rains, retain more through summer, and improve the usefulness of the water stored.

Read the full article in the latest SEPWA Newsletter: https://sepwa.org.au/newsletter-autumn-2026/