AN early start to seeding is underway with growers taking advantage of soaking rains over Easter that has forced some to rethink their entire cropping mix in order to take advantage of the moisture.
Latham grower Brian McAlpine's seeding started over Easter after what he calls "significant" falls and plans to finish by May 20.
"We pulled the air-seeder out of the shed and started seeding, normally you spend a week getting it ready," he said.
"We had a really good sowing opportunity."
Mr McAlpine has swapped out his planned 1200 hectares barley completely on the back of the rains, adding to his GT-50 canola plantings to make 2558ha in total.
He has never started seeding this early.
"The problem is since 2000 we never know when our next rainfall event is going to come," he said.
"So you need to take advantage of when you can get the crop up and going."
"It definitely put our foot to the floor.
"There's plenty of moisture there, we're taking bit of a risk and because of the warm weather we are sowing it deeper than what we normally would."
Around 1000ha of lupins will be in the ground next and 2319ha of wheat will follow.
"We're working backwards with our planning," he said.
Last Friday he had a day left in canola before deep ripping and waiting for the next rainfall.
"We'll then start lupins and it'll be the start of May for our wheat," Mr McAlpine said.
The quick start to seeding adds to a busy year at Elserae Agriculture where summer spraying has just finished, winter spraying is about to begin and lime is in the process of being deep ripped into the soil.
At Scaddan, David Campbell was starting seeding on Monday, taking into account the set up of his new air-seeder.
He recorded 40 millimetres over Easter adding to regular rainfall over summer.
Mr Campbell said starting early seeding was very welcome on the bare paddocks that experienced fire and wind damage last year.
"We will put in some long season canola and seed some vetch and a few other longer-seed varieties," he said.
"We just make sure all of our gear is ready to go and hopefully we are as well be prepared as we can be ready to put faba beans in very shortly as well."
Mr Campbell said the early sowing time for his 10,5000ha cropping program was also allowing him to pick the best sowing time for his varieties.
He said this was making the process "a little bit less strenuous".
The fire-affected paddocks have allowed Mr Campbell to plant traditional canola this year on a small scale due to the lack of weed germination.
"We're putting in the old conventional style canola because that is a very vigorous grower and we think we've had a big impact through the fires on some of our country," he said.
"We're not seeing the usual weeds or plants come up or in the numbers that we would normally expect so if there's ever going to be a plus out of this, we've got potentially reduced weed burden and certainly a reduced snail population.
"It's a golden opportunity to capitalise on some of these unfortunate circumstances and incidents and have a little bit of a reprieve.
"If we can manage it from here on it's going to be a better situation."
Rainfall of 92mm at Bruce Rock has Carl and father Franz Fuchsbichler trying to start seeding with the threat of getting bogged and disturbing the soil looming over them.
The pair have recorded 160mm for the year so far and began seeding pastures on March 15.
This was the plan according to Mr Fuschbichler who said they finished pasture sowing just in time for the Easter rain.
"We weren't too sure what we'd get in that Easter rain, but our aim was to get all our sheep feed in before the beginning of April so we could start planting our canola.
"Last year we were about a week or so behind everyone and the yield difference between what everyone else got and what we got was the difference between a profit and a loss."
It has been stop and start with seeding targeted for the hill tops as the wet soil still remained a concern on Monday, but compared to previous years with 24 hour seeding schedules, Mr Fuchsbichler said he wouldn't say no to even more rain.
At Brookton, Troy Bassett isn't moving on seeding until mid-April, concerned a long dry could kill off any germination.
He recorded 50mm at his property over Easter.
"When we start around April 12 it's about two weeks earlier than normal for us," Mr Bassett said.
"The rain was unusual, but we're not sure it's going to join up with the main season.
"We're not sure if we start seeding now if it'll die before the next main break.
"Hopefully by the end of the month we'll have a proper break."
Air-seeder preparation and crutching of the 2000 sheep he runs are current priorities before work starts on sowing the 2200ha cropping program of canola, oats and barley.
Despite waiting, Mr Bassett said the recent falls added well to their 65-75mm of summer rainfall and meant there should be moisture under the surface to spur on plant growth later in the season.