Water wonderful feeling … rain washes away the dog days

Farmers across Australia’s north and east are benefiting from above-average rainfall, and they can expect it to keep falling for the ­remainder of the year.

Cattle farmer and stock manager Emma Lawrence, 29, with her kelpies on her newly green Glen Idol station in Wallabadah, NSW. Picture: Paul Mathews

Last summer, they were in the midst of the worst drought in decades. Now, farmers across Australia’s north and east are benefiting from above-average rainfall, and they can expect it to keep falling for the ­remainder of the year.

For the first time since February 2018, the Bureau of Meteorology has launched a “La Nina watch”, expecting above-average rainfall for the next six months in many eastern parts of the country.

Felicity Gamble, the bureau’s senior climatologist, said the ­October to December outlook showed a strong probability of this summer season being wetter than ­average across swathes of NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia.

“We are seeing probabilities of more than 80 per cent of much of eastern Australia receiving above-­average rainfall,” Ms Gamble told The Weekend Australian.

“There are also strong odds that we will see more rainfall than is normal for this time of year due to the La Nina system in the ­Pacific Ocean.”

While the forecast is promising, 29-year-old Wallabadah ­cattle farmer Emma Lawrence said the harsh conditions from previous years were never too far from her mind.

“The past two years were absolutely dreadful. They were really hot and dry, but in 2016 we had a wonderful winter,” said Ms Lawrence, who runs the Glen Idol ­station where she lives with her mother and stepfather.

“It was so wet and the season was the best we had ever seen, but when we went into spring it started to dry up and it really hit us in the summer of 2018-19.”

Ms Lawrence said while she hoped it would continue to be a great season, she knows she will see a return to dry conditions eventually. “We’re still wary,” she said. “We’ve been in the area for about 16 years now and we've only seen a few good seasons.”

For now, though, Ms Lawrence said the state of her farm was “the best we’ve ever seen”.

“We’ve got feed up to our knees in some places, when back in January we were in dirt,” she said.

Lawrence rounds up the cattle. Picture: Paul Mathews

Jared Greenville, chief commodity analyst for the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, said a boom in grain production had been driven largely by NSW, which had bounced back from drought.

The Australian reported on Monday that official figures showed just 3 per cent of NSW remained in drought, a sharp reversal from the same time last year when 97.2 per cent of the state was in some way affected by drought.

Despite this, a drop in beef, veal, wheat and other commodity prices meant there was unlikely to be any immediate increase in the value of the harvest.

And Cheryl Kalisch Gordon, senior grains and oilseeds analyst from agricultural lender Rabobank, said while conditions had ­improved across most of the country, Western Australia had missed out on the high levels of rainfall.

“WA is a little bit of an outlier in the national context because it hasn’t had the same amount of rainfall as other parts of Australia, and that’s because the La Nina doesn't develop a favourable rainfall pattern in the west,” Dr Kalisch Gordon said.

“Despite having rainfall and some good crops, they haven’t had enough rain to fill dams, so it will be a more challenging summer in WA and it will be more reliant on getting rainfall more regularly.”

Ms Gamble told The Weekend Australian the September to November outlook was also showing an above-normal fire potential in the northeastern part of NSW, as well as parts of Queensland. “For the remainder of Australia, it’s near-normal fire potential, which means we don’t have the same above-normal risk we had last year,” she said.

Ms Gamble said the level of rain over the past month in southeastern parts of NSW had also helped moderate the potential for bushfires — “to an extent”.