THERE was still eight days of the month remaining when the first delivery of grain was received by CBH Group last Wednesday, officially marking the beginning of the 2021/22 harvest.
Fifty five tonnes of Roundup Ready canola was delivered to the Geraldton Terminal on September 22 by corporate cropping group Viridis Ag's The Grange farm at Dongara.
Farm manager Levis MacKenzie said the 540XC canola was planted on April 9, just a couple of days before ex-Tropical Cyclone Seroja hit and dumped 40 millimetres of rain on the freshly sown crop.
"It germinated really well but got a little bit dry and warm towards the end of April which meant it developed really quickly and started flowering by the end of May," Mr MacKenzie said.
"It looked really good all year and with it having been quite mature all year, it had finished flowering by the end of August, so it had a long flowering window.
"We ended up making the decision to swathe it, which we did about 10 days before we harvested it, then with the warm weather it was ready to go very quickly."
It had been wet all season on the Dongara farm up until the end of July, after which it dried out pretty quick which has sped up the timings of harvest and meant The Grange is a full month ahead of where it was last year.
While the delivery wasn't the earliest ever received by CBH - that record was set around 2015 with a September 16 delivery of wheat from the far north of the Geraldton zone - it was still 10 to 14 days earlier than usual.
CBH Geraldton zone manager Duncan Gray said the first receival was usually delivered between October 4 and 10.
"The port is the only site that's open at the moment as that's all that is needed at the current time," Mr Gray said.
"I don't think we will start to get grain coming in really quickly quite yet, but I think we'll see some barley and more canola deliveries slowly start to come in here and there.
"With there being a bit of weather over the weekend, that might hold a few people back, so by the end of this week we'll probably start to see a bit more."
With it being earlier on in the season than usual, CBH required some notice that a delivery would be made, with Mr MacKenzie calling early last week to give the co-operative a heads up of his pending trip.
"We started Tuesday and booked a contractor to come out and pick up the grain the following day as I was confident we would have a load by then, but then the harvester broke down," Mr MacKenzie said.
"We had to swap it out and get another one up and running which took a little while, so the truckie was waiting around for a little while, but it wouldn't be harvest without a little drama.
"Getting the machine settings right took a little while, but we've got that under control now and it should be smooth sailing from here - the crop is going over two tonnes per hectare and the rest of the deliveries should be CAN1."
The Grange has a large canola program with 5885ha of golden goodness making up over a third of the farm's 14,300ha of arable land.
Only a portion of that canola is set to be swathed, as a means of getting going earlier, with the rest set to be directly harvested.
"It's a positive thing for us to be going this early, even though it is only a small area," Mr MacKenzie said.
"We're not going with all of the machines - we cranked up with one header originally and had three going by the end of last week, while the other three, for a total of six headers, will probably be up and running by the end of this week.
"We could have even been harvesting a few days earlier if we were a bit more organised and we certainly didn't expect to be the first, but it's been a bit of a different crop and that variety really just went hard early on, so it was a bit unexpected."
For CBH, the delivery marks the start of an exciting but busy time of year, however it will be a month until all of the sites in the zone are likely to be open.
The co-operative is also still in the process of outloading, shifting carry over grain and completing major capital expenditure works at some sites.
Mr Gray said if growers needed to deliver to a site, it was best to give them a two to three day warning.
"That gives us time to get the computers reset and calibrated, do the test samples and then generally we're good to go," he said.
"Site openings will be phased as needed over the next month, with some such as Latham and Marchagee likely not opening until the end of October as a lot of the crops that way still have green through them.
"We're not going to get wheat, canola, lupins and barley all at the same time - generally at the beginning it'll just be canola and maybe a little bit of barley, so we can operate just a couple of grids and we can be flexible around that."
Growers and drivers are also being reminded that when they do start to make deliveries, the aim is for them to stay in their trucks as much as possible in order to limit interaction and the possibility of any COVID-19 scares.
