After early rains, farmers still need follow-up falls in the next few weeks

THOUSANDS of farmers across the country’s grain belts, sitting on potentially the most valuable harvest for a decade, are looking nervously to the skies.

After years of drought, widespread and perfectly timed rains produced an astonishingly good start to the winter cropping season this year, bringing forecasts of a $7.7 billion wheat and barley bonanza.

Record highs on the Chicago Futures Exchange this week reinforced the Australian Wheat Board’s highest ever pool price offer of $300 a tonne.

Wheat prices surged in the US to a record high of $US7.54 a bushel after Canada said its wheat crop might be almost 20 per cent smaller than last years.

The high prices are being driven by the poor quality and quantity of the European and North American crops now being harvested, and by a low Australian dollar.

But a good end to 2007 depends on the one thing nobody can control: rain.

Anzac Day is generally regarded as the beginning of the wheat, barley and canola planting season. This year, substantial falls acrossthe cropping areas from southern Western Australia, across South Australia and through NSW and Victoria encouraged growers to sow more than 20 million hectares of seed. The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics has predicted a harvest in excess of 37 million tonnes, 21 million tonnes more than the drought- affected 2006/07 season.

But after all the early season optimism, now the farmers wait and watch.

“We had a perfect start to the season — it was as good as we could hope for,” says Bill Long, who runs a farm consulting business with his wife Janet from their property, Cooinda, on the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia.

Vigorous growth in the early months led to forecasts of a wheat crop this year of 22.5 million tonnes, more than double what was produced last season. Wheat prices, which have continued to improve throughout the year, value the crop at $5.8 billion, more than double last year’s $2.6 billion.

While some have received the follow up rains they so urgently need to get their crops through to harvest in December, many others are holding their breaths. The next few weeks are make or break time.

Peter McBride, spokesman for the Australian Wheat Board, said the high prices were adding to the optimism. Coming off a drought, growers would have planted “hell or high water”. “The current estimates are extremely positive, but spring rain is critical,” he said.

What’s making farmers even tense is the fact that last year many of them also saw a good start to the season in different parts of thecountry, only for it to end in disaster.

“The mood is one of extreme nervousness,” Bill Long says. “Everyone is fearful of a repeat of last year’s disastrous finish to theseason. Farming operations incurred some huge financial losses last year — and it was a similar start to the season. But from then on it’s been very dry.”

Jeanette Long said the last few years had been tough on farmers on the Yorke Peninsula. The gentle undulating paddocks on her picturesque mixed farm Cooinda look good, but the season’s uncanny similarity to last year is making many of her friends and colleagues very nervous.

“Farmers are optimistic folk, or we wouldn’t keep going,” she says. “There is a lot of potential out in the paddock, but we need good spring rains to finish things off. With grain prices as they are, a good season will really help people to recover.

“We’re all holding our breath and looking at the sky, hoping to see rain clouds. People feel under pressure.”

Chief Commodity Analyst with ABARE Terry Sheales said after a string of dry years, sub-soil moisture was poor in many regions and crops would not survive a warm, dry spring. “The rain received in the next few weeks will be very important to the crop outcomes,” he said.

TABLE: GOLDEN GRAIN

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