The Break newsletters

G’day I’m Dale Grey, based in Bendigo, working with Agriculture Victoria in the Grains Team, and I’m a seasonal risk agronomist.

Basically I provide information to farmers to help them make better use of seasonal climate forecasts.

We’re in our tenth year of putting out our Break newsletter. Sadly or not I’ve been involved with just about all of them for ten years, every month.

I’ve been everywhere man this year. Normally I do about 35 (talks) a year, and this year I’ve done 63.

And so I’ve been to Tasmania, Adelaide, New South Wales, I’ve spoken remotely to people in Queensland, as far and wide as Yarrawonga up in the north east and Nagambie, a couple down in Melbourne at head office, all the way over to Lake Bolac in the south, Nhill over in the Wimmera and up to the big metropolis of Quambatook in the southern Mallee.

This financial year we’ve increased our membership by 500. It has pretty much gone from 2500 to over 3000 so that’s the highest we’ve ever been.

This year looks like there’s no bad news.

Last year was tough. It was a lot of talks telling people it didn’t look good, after a poor year the year before in a lot of situations.

Whereas this year, just about all the news is positive, and it’s hard to see any bad linings, unless there’s a lot of flooding going on, but I think we’d be very unlucky to get a poor season this year.

I’ve been in the department now, this is my 24th year, so I reckon if you’ve stayed in the job in the department for that long, you can’t hate it too much.

My costume department’s getting larger, and my musical instrument department.

This is their third year now, we’re averaging somewhere between 1400 to 1700 views of those, which is really good.

And I can’t remember lines either which is…I can remember about two sentences in a row and that’s it, and he splices it all together to make me look infinitely better than what I am.

(Laughs)

I don’t take myself too seriously. I’m not afraid to be basically acting in front of the tele, and … yeh. It’s quite a strange situation to be in, but it is fun.

(Laughs).