Ted Langley lives just out of Bordertown in South Australia, cropping and running sheep on the farm that has been in his family for 150 years.
Ted Langley is a mixed enterprise farmer from Bordertown, in South Australia's Upper South East region. He runs Pine Hill Station - which has been in his family for almost 150 years - alongside his wife, Cathy, daughter Clare, and nephews Randall and Jarrod. His brother Bill was also involved until his sudden passing two years ago. The family grows canola, beans and wheat, alongside running 2,000 Merino ewes that are joined to either Merino rams or terminal sires.
Ted has never been a believer in the 'but we've always done it this way' mentality, instead always remaining open to trialling different management options and farming methods. Over the years, he has experimented with a number of practices, including yield mapping, cover cropping and switching to early vigour varieties. He is well known as one of the early adopters of no-till cropping, which he adopted in the late 1980s. He has since evolved to a zero tillage method, first through the switch to a disc seeder, then adding a stripper front to his header later on to complete the strip disc system. Always keen to be involved at an industry level, Ted served a stint as treasurer of the South Australian No-Till Farmers Association and has more recently been a trustee of the South Australian Grains Industry Trust.
With a strong belief in the importance of environmental stewardship and the preservation of herbicide chemistries, Ted's approach to weed management is a robust one. He employs all of WeedSmart's 'Big 6' strategies for weed control, completing the set through the purchase of a Seed Terminator in 2021 to aid in harvest weed seed control.
Last year, Ted was named a 2023 Syngenta Growth Award national winner in the productivity category. In June this year, he will join the other national winners on a study tour of Europe.
