Harvest 2022: Glimmer of hope as wheat harvest gets underway

For Victorian growers on raised or undulating country, harvest 2022 hasn’t turned out quite so badly as initially feared.

As growers in northern Victoria approach Christmas — the traditional end of harvest milestone — many are still weeks from finishing the season.

That delay means high risk, and high stress, for growers on wafer-thin margins.

But for landholders on raised or undulating country, there was a glimmer of hope that the season may not turn out as badly as initially feared.

Boomahnoomoonah grower Anthony Hammon said he was happy with how his crops had coped after a drenching 280mm of rain in October and November.

Mr Hammon had found low test weights in barley and was facing patchy quality in the wheat as he made his first inroads into the crop on Saturday.

But after months of heavy rain and storms, he was “quite happy with how things are tracking”.

Cereals on the property, which normally averaged between 4t/ha and 5t/ha, were hovering around the lower end of the range, while canola achieved a comfortable 2.8t/ha and a high oil content of 46 per cent.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

Crops that haven’t been flooded are producing good yields in Victoria. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Cargill director Peter McBride said grain quality across southern NSW and Victoria was “generally good … however there has been some downgrading due to test weights/dark tipping in barley, mould in canola and distorted/white grains in wheat.”

“Where crops have managed to stay out of floodwaters, yields have reportedly been excellent,” Mr McBride said.

Rutherglen grower and Grains Research and Development Corporation southern panel chairman Andrew Russell said growers were carrying a lot of anxiety as harvest stretched on.

“The risk is that there’s going to be another rain event around the corner. And that can have some devastating effects, especially on ripe canola that’s still unharvested.

“On our cereals, there’s a big spread between the higher protein grades of wheat through to your feed grades … so that (rain) can have an enormous impact,” Mr Russell said.

In Victoria, growers had delivered 1.9 million tonnes of grain to GrainCorp receival sites as of Monday — about 17 per cent of the state’s forecast 10.7 million tonne crop, and 1.2 million tonnes less than they had delivered on the same date in 2021.

NSW was even further behind, with 28 per cent of a 13.2 million tonne crop delivered — 2.3 million tonnes less than this time last year.