WHILE many farmers across the WA grainbelt brace themselves for a below-average season, growers in the Esperance Zone are gearing up for a record breaker.
According to CBH estimates, the Esperance zone is expecting to receive between 2.7 million tonnes and 3mt this season, up from the five-year average of about 2.5mt.
CBH Esperance zone manager Mick Daw said an early break to the season and consistent rainfall had set growers up for a fruitful 2017 harvest.
“Everybody has had a really good season, the rain has come at the right time, they had a good early season break and things got away well,” Mr Daw said.
“They’re obviously starting to grow some exceptional crops year-in, year-out.
“Probably the one thing that is holding it back a little bit is just extra hectares of canola which obviously volume wise will peg things back a touch but that being said, we’re still expecting a record crop.”
Mr Daw said fine conditions early last week saw a boost in receivals, with more than 200,000 tonnes delivered within the zone in the week to last Friday, November 3.
That took total deliveries for the zone up to more than 277,000t, with all receival sites open.
Most deliveries have been made up of good quality canola and a small amount of barley and wheat.
Mr Daw said CBH was confident it was capable of storing the record crop, with additional capacity introduced to the network this year.
“We’re pretty fortunate we came in with a really low carry over so that definitely helped,” Mr Daw said.
“We’ve put some extra storage into Grass Patch – another 60,000t – and we’ve got about another 60,000t at Shark Lake just out of Esperance which we had last year but we didn’t need to utilise.
“The Lakes are a lot better this year than they were last year so they’ve got storage capacity as well.
“With all of that, our biggest concern at the moment is just the amount of harvest shipping, but we’re starting to get more and more, so that’s getting better all of the time.”
Mr Daw said he expected deliveries to increase over the next fortnight as growers moved onto harvesting cereal crops.
He said community sample huts were being utilised within a 50 kilometre radius of the Port, to help deal with the large volume of grain and reduce turnaround times for truck drivers.
OD Transport general manager Craig King expects to run more trucks this harvest to cater for the increased grain volume in the area.
He said while many growers were yet to begin harvesting their programs, he expected things to ramp up within the next couple of weeks.
“There’s a lot of people that haven’t started, we’re not under the pump yet,” Mr King said.
“Usually during harvest we might get up to 45 trucks, I expect it would be all of that and if we’re snowed under I’ll probably have to call some extras if I need them.
“It will be a challenge, all the subcontractors that I can get in I’ll get hopefully this week.”
