A bitter harvest

Another dry season has left Australia with a bare 9 million tonnes of wheat in the nation’s bins.

That figure, which the Australian Bureau of Statistics released today, compares with the 20.5 million tonnes held in storage, in December 2003, after a more normal season.

The current drought has been doubly bitter for the nation’s wheat farmers this season.

That’s because a world shortage of wheat has kept wheat prices unusually high.

Indeed, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics is predicting an average price of $US 310 a tonne for wheat, this financial year.

So growing wheat would have been a profitable business, if it had grown. But it hasn’t, because of the drought. And Australian farmers have had little, if any, wheat to sell, this season. Thousands have, once again, been looking out over dry, dusty paddocks, over recent months.

And many farmers, who have already been squeezed financially, are now finding it almost impossible to hang on.

Their financial capacity was hit once again, last financial year. ABARE estimates that incomes on broadacre farms fell by 40 per cent nationally then, an average of just $42,000.

And many farmers went backwards, financially.

“The proportion of farms reporting negative farm cash incomes increased in each State,” the bureau said.

Expect to hear some serious talk if you attend the Bureau’s annual National Agricultural Outlook Conference, which will be held in Canberra in the first week of March.