Cereal crops in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales are losing weight and quality every day as rain settles over the region, Liz Wells reports in Beef Central's weekly Feedgrain Focus. With more rain forecast into next week, harvesters are parked across the region.
In the week to Monday morning, harvest districts of southern Queensland recorded 44 mm at Dalby, 154 mm at Hannaford, 141 mm at Mitchell and 73 mm at Roma; in northern NSW, Moree had 70 mm, Narrabri 61 mm and Pallamallawa 52 mm. AgForce grains president Brendan Taylor, who farms at Warra, said: "It's not the ground that's the problem, it's the crop that won't dry out. You can't thresh it." He had harvested all his barley and about 30 percent of his chickpeas before the rain, and estimated southern Queensland as a whole was struggling to be 50 percent harvested.
Growers have been taking wheat and barley off at up to 17 percent moisture, well above the 12.5 percent maximum for bulk-handler deliveries, and drying it in aerated silos or sorghum driers where they can. Unharvested grain faces downgrades. "There'll be sprouted grain, there'll be mouldy grain, and there'll be grain lost," Taylor said. Still, he added, it is hard to be upset, because it had barely rained for four months.
At Mungindi on the Queensland-NSW border, agronomist Nellie Lawson said only about 40 percent of the intended winter-crop area was planted because of dry weather before the sowing window; chickpeas, which reached deep moisture, were the success story. Farms there have had 50 to 110 mm in the past week, which has opened the door to summer crops such as dryland cotton, mungbeans and sorghum.
The markets have barely moved. Narrabri broker Brendon Warnock said this is the region's first wet harvest since 2022 and the domestic feed wheat market is "running on fumes", while flat barley prices suggest feedlots had stocked up before the rain. There is concern about filling chickpea export commitments out of Brisbane. In the south, the Grain Industry Association of Victoria puts the state's barley crop at a record 6.4 million tonnes, against ABARES' national estimate of 16.4 million tonnes.
Photo: Cyron Ray Macey (a combine harvesting wheat near Pallamallawa, New South Wales) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Source: Beef Central
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