IT’S been a welcoming wet start for growers across the State with significant rain events over the past three weeks.
The season broke on May 24 when the first cold front hit the agricultural regions in what felt like months.
Some growers welcomed more than 20 millimetres while others missed out on the starting rains, including most of the Albany and Esperance regions.
The recent trough continued to drop rain across most of the agricultural region, with the Great Southern coastal areas still recording minimal rainfall.
The Bureau of Meteorology reported heavy showers last weekend over most of the South West, with Donnybrook recording 60mm on Sunday.
The Great Southern recorded a nice drop with 14mm in Arthur River and Narrogin recording 28mm.
Unfortunately the rain remained evasive further south, where Albany and Ravensthorpe recorded just 2mm two weekends ago. Alan Stevens, who farms in both Esperance and Ongerup, said his team was usually quite good at surviving on the “dribs and drabs” they receive, but this year there had no’t been enough rain.
Mr Stevens said his farm at Esperance had received a good start, but there had been no rain since the start of April, with falls of 5mm or less.“We have had no big downpour at all,” Mr Stevens said.
“All the lupin, barley and wheat are coming up nicely because we seeded them a bit deeper and got their roots down to start with, besides the hammering it got from the wind.
“But the canola that was seeded quite shallow in the non-wetting soils, needed that 10mm to get up and going which it never got, so that’s really patchy.”
Mr Stevens said Esperance usually had a lot of stored moisture from wetter summers.
“We had a fair bit of summer rain and you only had to dig down 10 centimetres and you were in good moisture,” he said.
But there wasn’t enough rain to join it up a little more, therefore the shallow sown canola is struggling.
Mr Stevens said he hoped he had finished seeding in Esperance, with a chance he had to go back and reseed some of the canola that had not come up.
Fortunately his farm at Ongerup was looking much better, with 15mm last week and 22mm a few weeks earlier.
“As much as it has been horribly dry, its actually looking pretty good now,” Mr Stevens said.
“The big wind that came through was dry and dusty and there was no stored moisture at all in the soil.
“But in the last fortnight we have had enough to soak in.” Ongerup, unlike Esperance, had no stored moisture at all due to little summer rain.
“If you dug down 150cm now it would still probably be dry,” he said.
Mr Stevens only has about a week of seeding left to go at Ongerup before he is finished putting in his cropping program for the year.
Further north, Irwin farmer Sally O’Brien couldn’t be happier with the start to the season.
Ms O’Brien described the start as a “beautiful, traditional break to the season,” thanks to more than 40mm falling across the property about a fortnight ago.
Recently the family was lucky enough to receive another 15-20mm.
“The whole profile is wet,” Ms O’Brien said.
“Because it had been almost unseasonably warm the germination has been really fast and the grass has come on really quick in our pastures which has been lovely because we have been hand feeding sheep and cattle extensively.”
Ms O’Brien said she went out to feed hay to her cows recently and out of the six mobs she was feeding, feed was only required for two of the mobs.
“I thought I had a big day on the hay truck and I only ended up doing two because the grass had grown so fast that they were all getting good feed,” she said.
With 420 breeding cows calving at the moment, she said there was a lot of hay getting moved around.
“We also have a bit more than 6000 ewes which are in the middle of lambing,” she said.
“Until we had that rain, the ewes were under a lot of pressure, they were lighter in condition than we would have liked them to be.”
With an average winter last year and a long summer, Ms O’Brien said they were hand feeding a lot of barley, oats and hay.
“It didn’t seem to matter how much we gave them they were still finding it pretty tough,” she said.
When Farm Weekly spoke to Ms O’Brien last week she said she hadn’t yet finished seeding, having only put a fraction of the program in before the rain.
“Due to weed control and a lot of sand that has a non-wetting issue, we really weren’t keen to put a huge amount in prior to the rain,” she said.
“The seeding bar has been going 24 hours around the clock pretty much since the rain and everything is going into a lovely wet profile which is good.”
Ms O’Brien said they would be finished with the bulk of their wheat, lupin and canola program this week, before moving on to pastures, hay and standing fodder crops.
Compared to last year, Ms O’Brien said she could not have asked for a better opening to the season, with last year producing a staggered start.
“We didn’t get that classic rain to soak the whole profile at the start so we were always chasing moisture and then we fortunately got a soft September,” she said.
Already she has canola and lupins that have germinated and are looking good, with the wheat also on its way.
Ms O’Brien was hopeful they would receive this weekend’s predicted 10-15mm of rain on Sunday.“You couldn’t order it any better,” she said.
Bolgart farmer Murray Clarke has been lucky to receive rainfall from most events over the past few weeks.
He recorded 30mm from light showers recently.
The rain has established an even germination for wheat and canola, with the barley not too far behind.
Mr Clarke said the rainfall was welcome after the dry start to the season.
“It’s good not to see dust,” he said. “Now hopefully we can get on to spray it.”
With many farmers around the State wrapping up their seeding programs, many more are hoping for more rain with some crops needing that extra push.
Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPRID) spokesman Ian Foster said despite widespread rain in the last week of May, total rain for the month was still well below average.“
Historically this is an average to late start,” he said.
“The early part of June has seen variable rain totals across cropping areas, with only light falls in the south east.”
Mr Foster said south eastern parts and the South Coast had lower than normal soil water storage for this time of year.
The seasonal rainfall outlook from DPIRD’s statistical model for June to August shows a preference towards below average rainfall. “
Half of international climate models have a neutral outlook for this period, meaning no preference towards either wetter or drier than normal conditions and about a third of models are indicating below average seasonal rainfall being more likely,” he said.
