WHEAT YIELD IN AUSTRALIA

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25394, 17 January 1948, Page 5

WHEAT YIELD IN AUSTRALIA

Problems of Record Crop FLOODS DESTRUCTIVE IN N.S.W. Writing to the “Farmer and StockBreeder” in London in December, an Australian correspondent said it was expected at one stage that the Australian export surplus of wheat would be about 173.000,000 bushels. Of that total 140,000,000 bushels was expected to leave Australia as grain and 70,000 bushels as high quality flour. Since then the eastern states of Australia have experienced rainfall and flooding to such an extent that in New South Wales it was expected that 20,000.000 bushels had been destroyed, bringing that state’s estimated yield to less than 100.000,000 bushels. Enormous quantities of wheat were exposed on the farm and at railway sidings, and hundreds of grain trucks sent to the wheat belt remained empty because the wheat was too damp to load. When harvesting was started the wheat crop was estimated to total 253.000,000 bushels, the largest in the nation’s history and more than 39,000,000 bushels better than the previous record of 1932-33. Even as the first grain from the eastern Australian wheatlands reached the elevators of the Pacific coasts reports started to arrive of the damaging storms. The World demand for wheat is great, and Australia’s export price is at the high level of 19s 6d a bushel f.o.b. The home price is guaranteed at 5s 2d. Farmers whose crops met expectations this season will have a chance to make up for some of the poor seasons of the past. > In addition to the bad weather there was some danger, particularly in north-west Victoria, of damage from rust. The Victorian Department of Agriculture was reported to be on guard watching developments closely. The incidence of the disease emphasised an error in popular thinking that wheat rust had been defeated in Australian .wheat growing. People speak of “rust-proof wheat.” Resistance has been brought to a considerable strength by scientific breeding, but the “rustproof wheat” which farmers dream about is still a dream. Storage Problems

The total estimated crop was far beyond Australia’s permanent storage capacity, in spite of the big bulk-hand-ling systems in New South Wales and Victoria, where the grain is mostly stored and carried by rail trucks without bagging and is later poured in streams into ships’ holds or held in great waterfront silos. The excess meant that until the wheat could be moved away from railway sidings big temporary storages were needed.

The storage problem has been gravely aggravated by the shortage of jute bags from India. Australia needs bags, not only in states like South Australia and Queensland, where there are no bulk handling facilities, but for the carriage of wheat from the farms to the railway stations in the bulkhandling states. Another problem has been the difficulty of recruiting sufficient labour.

The 1947-48 wheat crop was grown on a little more than 74,000 farms and 14.600,000 acres in five states. Rainfall in the wheat areas ranges from 11 inches to 25 inches a year, but the December storms raised the figures in some part®. The season’s yield is estimated to have used 450,000 tons of superphosphate in all. Other crops such as barley, oats, rye, and maize, used an estimated 150,000 tons.

To enable Australian farmers to get supplies of fertiliser cheaply, the Federal Goverment subsidises the firms which make it from phosphate rock from Nauru. A ton of fertiliser, 21 per cent, phosphoric acid, for example, costs the farmer only £6.