Wheat harvest this year has been a bit of a disaster for everyone. Southern areas simply had a dry year. Northern areas like the Liverpool Plains and the rest of northern NSW, and all of Queensland had a great season. However once the grain was ripe, down came the rain and pretty much followed the harvest south.
We expect rain at harvest, as December is our second wettest month after January. But this year there was just heaps. There's been about 200 mills in the last month to bring our yearly rainfall for the year so far to 775 mills. 100 mills above average. So the wheat has all been reduced to feed quality. Nothing unusual, as it happens all the time, but this year with grain prices crashing, prices are terrible. Currently worth $150 per tonne for feed quality wheat whereas last years feed wheat was worth $400 per tonne.
Photo of the harvest today,.....
We did harvest a small amount of grain that was relatively undamaged. It pretty much rained every second day for a month. You would start, get 20 tonnes off and down it would come again. before the rain started the crop would have went 5 tonnes per hectare. The constant rain starts the seed germinating in the head, and the rain washes the guts out of the grain, it losses protein, losses weight, losses colour and this year it has almost halved in value. Mostly, feed grain doesn't drop so much in value, but this year as the damage is so widespread, quality grain is at a premium and the crap at a discount. Ours is nearly all crap.
What we are harvesting now is going about 4.5 t/h. We would have lost at least 10% in weight, and the grain would have lost 40% of it's value.
We won't sell any grain now. We will be able to store every tonne. Selling now would probably mean we make a small loss. It cost a small fortune to plant as all the inputs were bought at the peak of the bubble. We should have locked in some prices, but we never saw this commodity crash coming. Not many farmers did. We will just hope prices move up a bit, and if not, then too bad. We will look forward to next year and lower fertilizer, chemical and fuel prices.
Photo of some quality grain on the left, compared to some weather damaged crap on the right. Probably $250/t back to $150/t.
We had 400 hectares of wheat in. About 60% harvested now. Should be finished by the end of the weekend if there is no more rain and it looks like it might finally be gone for a little while. We have planted 950 hectares of grain sorghum. It's looking OK, but it didn't need that much rain either. It could do with some hot dry weather for a few weeks. Photo of some of the sorghum,....
The rain is good news for anyone not with wheat or other winter grains to harvest. Most of the graziers are pretty happy. All the creeks and rivers are flowing nicely and there's been a few floods down them. There has been so much rain on the wheat country that I could plant another crop straight back into it, like I did with the sunflowers last year, but as prices are not much good, I won't bother.
I spent a lot of last weekend canoeing down some local creeks with some mates. That's pretty special to be able to do that.
See ya's.
We expect rain at harvest, as December is our second wettest month after January. But this year there was just heaps. There's been about 200 mills in the last month to bring our yearly rainfall for the year so far to 775 mills. 100 mills above average. So the wheat has all been reduced to feed quality. Nothing unusual, as it happens all the time, but this year with grain prices crashing, prices are terrible. Currently worth $150 per tonne for feed quality wheat whereas last years feed wheat was worth $400 per tonne.
Photo of the harvest today,.....
We did harvest a small amount of grain that was relatively undamaged. It pretty much rained every second day for a month. You would start, get 20 tonnes off and down it would come again. before the rain started the crop would have went 5 tonnes per hectare. The constant rain starts the seed germinating in the head, and the rain washes the guts out of the grain, it losses protein, losses weight, losses colour and this year it has almost halved in value. Mostly, feed grain doesn't drop so much in value, but this year as the damage is so widespread, quality grain is at a premium and the crap at a discount. Ours is nearly all crap.
What we are harvesting now is going about 4.5 t/h. We would have lost at least 10% in weight, and the grain would have lost 40% of it's value.
We won't sell any grain now. We will be able to store every tonne. Selling now would probably mean we make a small loss. It cost a small fortune to plant as all the inputs were bought at the peak of the bubble. We should have locked in some prices, but we never saw this commodity crash coming. Not many farmers did. We will just hope prices move up a bit, and if not, then too bad. We will look forward to next year and lower fertilizer, chemical and fuel prices.
Photo of some quality grain on the left, compared to some weather damaged crap on the right. Probably $250/t back to $150/t.
We had 400 hectares of wheat in. About 60% harvested now. Should be finished by the end of the weekend if there is no more rain and it looks like it might finally be gone for a little while. We have planted 950 hectares of grain sorghum. It's looking OK, but it didn't need that much rain either. It could do with some hot dry weather for a few weeks. Photo of some of the sorghum,....
The rain is good news for anyone not with wheat or other winter grains to harvest. Most of the graziers are pretty happy. All the creeks and rivers are flowing nicely and there's been a few floods down them. There has been so much rain on the wheat country that I could plant another crop straight back into it, like I did with the sunflowers last year, but as prices are not much good, I won't bother.
I spent a lot of last weekend canoeing down some local creeks with some mates. That's pretty special to be able to do that.
See ya's.
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