Grain growers anxiously hoping for winter rainfall amid dry conditions

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The federal government commodity forecaster ABARES says this year's winter grain crop is on a knife's edge.   Many grain growers planted their crops into dry soils, and rainfall this winter will be critical, especially for those in drought-affected areas of south-eastern Australia.

Transcript

00:00Most of the winter grain crop is now in the ground and after a decent rainfall today in

00:08the central wheat belt, many will be breathing a sigh of relief. However, they're still waiting

00:14for a decent season break before they can really put their feet up and be confident

00:18in this season. I'm here at Rhys Turton's property just outside of Perth. He's also

00:24the chair of grain growers. Rhys, how confident are you feeling about this season?

00:29This is the first rain we've seen for a while, Clint, so it's a little bit of a mini drought

00:33breaker to be honest, but yeah, it does give everyone a bit of a boost. We were lucky enough

00:37to pick up 7.5 mils overnight and this morning and hopefully this is the first day of many

00:43days it's going to rain over the next week. So, yep, it's quite exciting. It's certainly

00:47a confidence booster and as you said, I think a fair bit of WA's crop is now in the ground

00:51and this was absolutely needed, no doubt. Many viewers will have seen some pretty harrowing

00:57scenes out of places like South Australia and South West Victoria recently with the drought

01:03conditions there. What are you hearing from grain grower members and the people that you

01:08correspond with about the tough times that those growers are going through?

01:12Yep, it's been quite horrific in South Australia and certainly parts of Victoria and the broader

01:17regions as well. Our national policy group members are keeping us well abreast of what's going

01:23on there. We're offering assistance and we're always hammering government's door about building

01:27resilience in farming systems around sort of freight, logistics, inputs, regulation and

01:33other burdens that always farmers seem to be getting imposed upon them. So that's our role

01:38as a national advocacy body.

01:40Is it a case this season that despite those pretty bleak conditions in SA and parts of Vic that

01:47the good is outweighing the bad and it's the season for crop reports now that everything's

01:54in the ground, some of the early predictions that I've seen are that production is rising

01:58off last year's figures?

02:00Yes, I saw some figures very recently. They're talking sort of 24 plus million hectares around

02:05Australia, 8 million plus of that in WA. I do believe South Australia was down on last

02:12year and not surprisingly so given the conditions and maybe a little bit of a lack of confidence

02:17coming from that state. But you're quite right, hectares are big in Australia this year.

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