Bad Weather Set to Ruin Australian Crops

Article by: Hari Yellina (Orchard Tech)

Bad weather across the country is downgrading the quality of one of the largest forecasted winter crops on record. Favourable seasonal conditions led the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) to predict in September that total agricultural production would surpass the $70bn mark for the first time but experts say Australian crops could lose billions in value due to weather.

As Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology declared a La Niña weather event in the Pacific on Tuesday, farmers are already feeling the effects first-hand.
Richard Heath, the executive director of the Australian Farm Institute, said the forecast would “definitely” come in lower than predicted.
It has been extraordinary weather all around the country; all the cropping areas have received very untimely rains. The fact that it was a cool temperate spring had added to the crop yields being so good, but the flipside is now Australia has gotten into the harvest period and the La Niña is really expressing itself with all this rain.

Some growers have avoided rainfall, as summer rainfall events tend to be isolated storms that may impact one grower and not another one. La Nina typically is caused by colder water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean which bring moist weather conditions to the Asia-Pacific region including South Asia and South-East Asia. However, the same phenomenon is a threat to South America as also southern parts of North America where it can reduce precipitation and create drought-like conditions. Occurring after a gap of nine years, La Nina this year is expected to be a moderate one, which means the impact on crops would be modest. The weather phenomenon is already creating an impact on the production of crops such as wheat, corn, soybean, coffee, sugarcane, palm oil with a concomitant effect on prices.

Global agricultural prices have shot up between 8 and 15 per cent in the last two months including wheat (up 14 per cent), maize (up 14.7 per cent), soybean (up 8 per cent) and sugar (up 9.3 per cent). Sorghum and barley have also moved up. All this follows risks to crop production in the southern hemisphere as well as dry conditions affecting winter sowing around Europe.

Article by: Hari Yellina (Orchard Tech)