Have July rainfalls been enough to alleviate any worries of a dry year?
We’ve had 100mm for July, so it’s wet.
It’s certainly a turnaround from the last couple months.
It’s been a bit of a surprise, and I can’t remember the last time we had 100mm in one month.
That’s a really wet month.
We’ve always had a saying that if you get 50mm two months in a row, it sets your season up really well, and we’ve had that in one month, plus a fairly big rain the month before.
We’ve got a lot of topsoil moisture and the year is looking really promising.
It’s absolutely alleviated a lot of worry for us, but it’s not all over the state.
Dry-seeding methods seemed to be popular, and successful, this season?
A lot of us all over the state sow dry now with the hope it’s going to rain.
It held off in the Mallee area and east of the ranges for quite some time, but I think they are getting enough rain now that those crops are established.
If we have a good spring they will still be able to salvage a good year out of it, and all the weather forecasts say it’s going to get wetter, not drier.
They are saying it won’t be quite as wet as 2016, but well along the way.
Are you expecting an increase in yields this year?
I would think so. We’ve got crops now that are just about finished with no more rain, so if we get average rain between now and the end of spring, we’ll have above average yields.
Canola prices are sky high and wheat prices aren’t too bad.
Some countries are struggling in other parts of the world and their loss is our gain, so we might fluke one of those rare years where prices and yields are both good at the same time.
That doesn’t happen very often.
Is there more confidence in the export market at the moment?
One of the benefits of Covid is that we’ve realised you can’t put all your hopes into one market, or one country, such as China.
We must diversify our markets… we became too dependant on China across the board.
The whole of our agricultural production must not be reliant on one country being our main market.
When China stops buying grain from us, they go somewhere else to buy it, and that leaves another door open for us to go in.
The international market is a changing scenario and where your main market might be one decade, in the next decade that will change.
Any advice for farmers at this stage?
You’ve got to accept change as it comes, and that’s going to be really important for Australia as a whole.
We’ve now realised some manufacturing in Australia is necessary, and it needs to be subsidised by the government to keep it here.
We’ve just put 40,000 litres of diesel storage on our farm, because we realised Australia runs on about a seven-day supply.
If a couple of boats get sunk… we run out of fuel in a week.
My advice is for farmers to store enough fuel to do at least one of their programs, either get a crop in or get a harvest off.
If we happen to run out and you can’t finish your harvest, your crop just rots.
It’s really important we have some self-sufficiency and an emergency plan.
