Rain disrupts winter crop harvest, but farmers remain confident of strong prices and yields

The heavy rains which were experienced throughout last week, fortunately, have not caused any severe damage ahead of the harvest in a couple of weeks.

Ordinarily harvesting may have been taking place as early as last weekend, but large downpours during winter actually forced many farmers to delay planting.

Given the conditions seen last week, Mr Hamparsum said the late planting was probably a blessing in disguise.

"That's at the moment probably a little bit of a benefit, because this rain coming though now would do a lot of damage to the crop if it was mature," he said.

"But we're probably two, to two and a half weeks away from harvest here, so the crops are still just turning now and the rain shouldn't impact those crops too much.

"Aside from that, a lot of it will probably fall down with the wind and the rain, and we'll have a little bit of trouble picking it up off the ground."

Despite the delay being beneficial in terms of making the crop less vulnerable to the wet weather, it is likely to have some less desirable effects.

He said it was likely that the late planting will meant yields won't be as strong as they otherwise could have been.

In terms of quality, Mr Hamparsum said it was too early to really tell but he was confident and looking forward to finding out, especially the past couple of years which have delivered bumper crops.

He did note that further north and west some farmers are in the middle of harvest, which will likely have been badly disrupted by the conditions.

It has had an effect on Andrew Watson at Boggabri, who is growing canola, durum wheat and chickpeas.

Luckily, he was able to already get some harvesting underway, and doesn't believe the rain they have received will have a catastrophic effect on what's left.

"We've made a start and harvested about half of our canola before the rain or between the rain, and yields have been excellent," he said.

"We haven't started on our durum wheat yet, it probably would have been ready for about now, so we're hoping that it was just green enough that it shouldn't be affected.

"And chickpeas are still green, but it might potentially lengthen the flowering there.

Minor flooding from the Namoi has made its way onto his property though.

"Our crops were all planted pretty much on time, we were all very happy with the planting," he said.

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"But I've got to admit that there is some minor flooding on the Namoi and some of that is actually going through our low fields.

"We currently can't move grain off farm because the flood has cut us off the farm.

"We'll need the water level to actually go down before we can move the grain."

Despite this he is still looking optimistically towards his variety of summer crop.

"For summer crop we have cotton, corn and sorghum growing and things are all going quite good for that really," he said.

Mr Hamparsum's point about the irony of rain now being a problem certainly isn't lost on other farmers.

It is, however, a much less heartbreaking problem to be dealing with.

From where things were three years ago to where they are now, it is almost unrecognisable even to those to have lived on the land their whole life.

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