SOME Western Australian growers have started planting oats unseasonably early on the back of solid early-season rainfall.
Mixed grain and livestock farmers have been scratching in the oats to use as stock feed, with many of them running light after a dry couple of years.
York grower and WAFarmers president Rhys Turton said he raced out and planted a few oats on February 28.
"It's not something I normally do so it was really just taking advantage of the bit of rain we had and the fact that we are and probably will be for a month or so, short of stock feed," Mr Turton said.
"With the ground wet enough, we're pretty confident they'll germinate and come to something, but it was really just an opportunistic crop."
Narembeen grower Jessie Davis said she put in about 80 hectares of oats on February 29.
"We've had about 50 millimetres of rain which is a pretty significant amount, the paddock was going into pasture already and it was going to be a manipulated pasture so we thought we may as well put something in and see if it grows," Ms Davis said.
"We normally don't start this until March or April and even March is historically pretty early to have a go, so February is quite unheard of out here."
Mr Turton said they had been short on stock feed over the summer due to lighter stubbles and lighter pastures from last spring.
"We thought this might be a way of getting a bit of growth and turning some sheep on to that in six to eight weeks' time," he said.
"It will be quite successful if we do get a bit of follow-up rain later in March and we'll keep that paddock locked up until there is enough ground cover to turn some ewes in on it."
Ms Davis said oats have such good vigour so they will get up quickly.
"We should be able to graze it even during seeding," she said.
"It's an option to put sheep on green feed while we're seeding instead of moving them around stubbles, it'll give us more time management wise so we can just set and forget hopefully."
Ms Davis said people around Narembeen had been cleaning dams over summer.
"It's been two or three really dry summers and this year started dry and we hadn't had a good rain, so there were so many dams cleaned out," Ms Davis said.
"We put some new catchments in and it was great to see our dams with those catchments nearly half full."
