Sowing new pastures can be a bit of a rough ride around parts of Walgett, especially in a dry season. That’s why farmer, Greg Weber, of Weber Farming, has developed a new contraption which he calls the Grass Storm. It hangs from a helicopter from a 33.5 metre sling. Mr Weber has been sowing Mitchell grass for years, but his country can get rough and it is hard to get among the timber, so he now flies the seed on and uses his cattle to trample it in. “The idea was I just wanted to fly the seed on. No one would sit in a tractor – it was just that rough,” he said. However, it took a bit of trial and error before they had a machine that could not only easily be carried by a helicopter, but also handle the clumpy nature of the seed. “When we first built it, we had the six augers running in one direction, and all (the seed) did was balled and compacted at one end,” Mr Weber said. He changed the design so every second auger ran in alternating directions, so any seed that didn’t go through the hole and onto the paddock below was taken back to the start. Mr Weber’s new machine can carry 250 kilograms of seed per load, which does 80 hectares at a rate of three kilograms of seed a h...