Cereal crops in the ground or to be sown are up 5 per cent - AIMI

Barley sowing is a mixed bag for the coming harvest with feed barley crops down 1 per cent and malting barley up 53 per cent, according to the results of an AIMI survey. Photo / Struan Christie

Cereal crops either in the ground or soon to be sown over an estimated 99,700 hectares are up 5 per cent on last season.

About 87 per cent of this total area was sown by October 10, which is on par with previous seasons.

This wasn’t helped by the wet and cold winter and spring, which delayed sowings and slowed growth across all regions.

However, conditions are starting to dry out now, the Arable Industry Marketing Initiative (AIMI) said.

An extra 3400ha in milling wheat and 3000ha in malting barley is being grown this season.

The overall area sown in milling wheat crops is expected to be up 44 per cent on last season, feed wheat crops are set to be up 1 per cent, feed barley crops down 1 per cent, malting barley up 53 per cent, milling oat crops down 29 per cent and feed oats down 30 per cent.

Federated Farmers Arable vice-chairman of grains Andrew Darling said farmer confidence in the prospects for milling wheat was on the upswing with 11,113ha already sown or going to be sown.

“That brings milling wheat hectares back very close to the 11,798ha harvested in 2021, before grower confidence was severely dented by changed buying practices by the mills and to a lesser extent poor conditions during last season’s grainfill.”

Milling wheat prices would need to remain competitive against returns from feed wheat, and contract signals given early enough at planting time, or growers would “react accordingly”.

The latest AIMI survey of 132 farms also looked at the production and sales of last summer’s harvest of wheat, barley and oats - including milling/malting crops and feed crops.

The about 767,000 tonnes of harvested wheat, barley and oats grown over the 2021-22 season was down 1 per cent on the previous year.

Maize grain production was about 195,900 tonnes, so the total grain production of grain was an estimated 963,000 tonnes.

Unsold stocks of cereal grain are estimated to have reduced by 63 per cent between the start of July and October 10. That’s back about 5 per cent on the same time last year.

The storage of sold and unsold grain on farms is down 7 per cent.

The percentage of hectares that has been “forward sold” by October 10 was estimated to be 53 per cent for milling wheat, 50 per cent for malting barley and 83 per cent for milling oats compared with estimates at the same time last year.

Forward sales of malting barley are markedly down on last year and are at 56 per cent for feed wheat, 47 per cent for feed barley and 61 per cent for feed oats.