A trial of 48 hectares of the Thunder lentil variety last year paid off at Parkview with the Konzag Grains operation, Mallala, sowing 1025 hectares of it this year.
Owner Richard Konzag plants 2400 ha across cereal and hay operations and said due to crop rotations their lentil planting had increased.
"The lentils are going over wheat and durum stubbles," he said.
"We are planting at a rate of 50 kilograms to the ha with 70kg of MAP and one per cent zinc."
He said the Thunder variety breeder Larn McMurray said it was a step up from other varieties.
"The Hurricane and Thunder yielded similar to each other last year at about 2 tonne/ha or just under," he said.
He was direct drilling the crops with a single disc John Deere and said it was "zero till".
"We always seem to have problems with pests on lentils and it seems to vary each year," he said.
"Lucerne flea can be a bit problematic on germinating lentils, but we have put some insecticide on the seed.
"So hopefully that'll alleviate that problem and we have just got to keep an eye on things to make sure something new doesn't pop up."
He said their seed grader applied the imidacloprid insecticide to the seed when it was being cleaned.
Mr Konzag has started sowing this year's crop despite not yet having the rain break after only receiving 17 millimetres of rain all year.
"We like to have our crops finished sowing by the 21st of May as that's my wife's birthday and I like to use that as a bit of a marker," he said.
"If we can finish by three quarters of the way through May that's ideal.
"We have an average yearly rainfall of about 395mm so we are keeping our fingers crossed that the long range forecasts that were around earlier in the year are right and that it's going to end up being a good year.",
He said they carried out a summer spraying program which included killing potato weed, melons and volunteers.
"We used glyphosate and LVE," he said.
"It was a 1.2 litre of glyphosate, and 500ml of Ester 680 but it just depends on what paddock you're in and what weed burdens are there."
Mr Konzag said he would love to reap a 3.5t/ha crop but their average was about 2.2t/ha.
"We will obviously be monitoring for insect pests and making sure everything germinates right." he said.
"Then we will be doing a post emergent weed spraying when that starts up."
Konzag Grains had also planted 190ha of Kingbale oats with DAP at a rate of 80kg/ha for the hay side of the business which targets weed control.
Interstate purchase allows farm growth
Expanding operations into Western Australia is a move the Konzag family has made to combat risk and increase growth with a property in Harrismith.
Richard Konzag said the enterprise had only kicked off this year in WA farming themselves.
"We share farm just under 1000 hectares," he said.
"Then we are leasing a bit over 4000ha as well.
He said the expansion into WA was an opportunity to spread risk and grow.
"We've sort of been slowly growing a business here in SA through leasing and buying land where we've been able to over the many years," he said.
"We spent a fair bit of time looking around.
"We looked in Victoria and Eyre Peninsula and the southeast of SA and looked at farms in those different areas.
"Then we went over in 2022 with four trips over to WA looking at different farms over there and thought that there was a reasonable opportunity there so here we bought some."
Mr Konzag said the WA operation was all cereal cropping at this stage with plans to expand into hay too.
"We're still getting everything set up there," he said.
"It's obviously quite a big task, buying a whole new set of plant and we're having two sets of plant - one here in SA and one over there.
"So we haven't got any hay equipment over there yet, but we have started sowing Canola."