Summer crops: Rice and cotton expectations fall

The summer cropping season is shaping up to be a far cry from the bounty of this year’s harvest. This is what farmers are saying.

The summer cropping season is shaping up to be a far cry from the bounty of this year’s harvest, with paddocks normally planted to crops transformed into lakes.

In May this year, the NSW Riverina was humming with trucks as rice growers harvested their largest crop in five years.

This season, with just days before rice planting would traditionally finish, growers were reporting they had planted far less than they had hoped, and were now pinning their hopes on a short season rice variety and a break in the clouds.

At Deniliquin, grower Louise Burge had hoped to plant 50ha of rice this season, but was no longer sure if it would be possible after heavy rain inundated her paddocks.

Nearby, farmer John Bradford had hoped to plant 250ha of rice, but so far had managed just 100ha.

“I’m wanting to plant a bit more, but I’ll probably plant about half (of the initial expectations),” he said.

“My expectations of yields have gone down a little bit, just because of complications with germination and because every week they are (planted) later there is a slight drop in expected yield,” Mr Bradford said.

Rice grower John Bradford's fields became lakes after 260mm of rain in October.

But growers were doing everything they could to get a crop in the ground despite soaking wet fields, he said.

He was now up to “plan E” and was planting into ground that hadn’t been worked in 15 years after he said his plans A, B, C and D had “gone out the window” with 260mm of rain in October. Meanwhile his neighbours were spending more than normal to ferry in rice from bitumen air strips for aerial seeding after local airstrips became too wet.

Rice Growers Association president Peter Hermann said this season would deliver less than last year’s harvest of 675,000 paddy tonnes, but it was still too early too tell how large the losses would be.

A large slice of low-lying country wedged between the Murray and Edward rivers, which normally represented roughly 15-20 per cent of Riverina rice production, was flooded and out of action this year.

Rice grower John Bradford managed to plant some rice before heavy rain in October.

Mr Hermann said growers still had the option of planting the Sherpa rice variety, which could be planted until the end of November or early December.

Meanwhile cotton growers in the Riverina had managed to plant just 30 per cent of land to crops — roughly 25,000ha — and could get to 30,000ha this week, CottonInfo Regional Extension Officer Kieran O’Keefe said.

Growers were expecting lower yields of eight bales to the hectare — a significant drop from the 11 bales/ha achieved last season.

The Riverina, with its shorter planting window, has been harder hit than northern planting areas. Overall, cotton production across the nation could be down 10-20 per cent on the 5.6 million bales harvested in the 2021-22 season, depending on rainfall over coming weeks.