Rice and cotton are set to bounce back to more “normal” production levels in NSW after years of small crops caused by drought-induced water shortages.
Another wave of widespread rain across the State in the past week has water pouring into major dams, and water allocations for irrigators are being steadily ramped up from a zero base in most valleys two months ago.
Most of the State received anything from 15 to 50 millimetres of rain, or more, in the week to Tuesday morning, which followed falls of 25 to 100mm across the grain belt in August.
Farmers throughout the State are now looking for a dry spell to avoid losses from water logging and to ease pressure from diseases such as stripe rust in cereals and ascochyta blight in chick peas.
Torrential rain during the weekend resulted in the NSW Government making natural disaster declarations covering the local government areas of Tumut, Gundagai, Tumbarumba, Eurobodalla, Wingecarribee, Shoalhaven, Shellharbour, Kiama and Wollongong.
Previously drought-stricken rivers in the Riverina are close to bursting their banks.
Tumbarumba copped 90 millimetres and Batlow 119mm, while 40mm to 50mm fell around Cootamundra, forcing farmers to put plans to spray cereal crops for stripe rust on hold.
The local Industry and Investment (I and I) NSW agronomist, Phil Bowden, said stripe rust remained a threat to many crops.
“Most people would like to see a bit of a drying out period now, although I don’t know if that is going to happen with the forecast for more rain in a couple of days,” he said.
Last week general security water users in the Murrumbidgee and Murray valleys got their first allocations in two years – nine per cent and eight pc of entitlement respectively – but further increases seem inevitable.
Moderate flooding this week in the Murray upstream of Hume Dam has lifted the dam’s level from 20pc at the end of May to more than 60pc by Tuesday, with water flowing in this week at the rate of more than 50,000 megalitres a day.
Burrinjuck Dam on the Murrumbidgee and Blowering on its tributary, the Tumut, are now 81pc and 78pc respectively.
“People are really confident they will get significant allocations,” said the executive director of the Rice Growers Association, Ruth Wade.
She said a 600,000-tonne rice crop – about three times the size of last year’s crop – was not out of the question.
“We had pre-season meetings last week and well over 300 growers attended," she said.
“They are very keen to get back into production.”
The NSW rice crop, which averaged about 1.2 million tonnes a year before the drought, dropped to a record low of 19,000t in 2007-08, and last year’s crop of 205,000t was the highest since 2005-06.
It’s a similar picture with cotton in northern NSW, where consistent good rain is expected to result in a boom in dryland sowings as well as an increase in the irrigated area.
Cotton Australia, in late August and before the latest rain, forecast a national cotton crop of 2.7 million bales from a sown area of 232,000 hectares, including about 100,000ha of dryland cotton, but these figures could now be conservative.
The NSW planting is expected to total about 108,000ha of irrigated cotton and 58,000 ha dryland.
Cotton Australia’s chief executive officer, Adam Kay, said with such a large planting likely, the crop would be grown in new locations and in areas which hadn’t seen cotton for years.
He has urged growers of crops other than cotton to consult the organisation’s cotton map on www.cottonmap.com.au, which plots fields where farmers intend to grow cotton, to reduce the risk of cotton being damaged by spray drift from phenoxyl herbicides.
Monsanto this week reported that 75 first-time cotton growers had already registered to grow its Bollgard 11 and Roundup Ready Flex varieties this summer.
Late last week, NSW Water Commissioner, David Harriss, announced general security allocations of 34pc in the Border Rivers, five per cent in the Gwydir – the first general security allocation there since February 2008 – and 53pc for Lower Namoi licence holders.
He also announced a lift in general security allocations in the Macquarie and Cudgegong valleys to 63pc of entitlement.
Meanwhile, Primary Industries Minister, Steve Whan has predicted a record 12 million tonne winter crop this year in NSW, including 7.8m tonnes of wheat.
He said according to Industry and Investment (I and I) NSW that would be more than double the average of the last drought-stricken decade.
He said sowings comprised 2.95 million ha of wheat, 316,000 ha of canola, 782,0000 ha of barley and 337,000 ha of chickpeas.
Mr Whan warned, however, the crop still faced risks from locusts, fungal diseases and waterlogging.
Acting technical specialist cereals for I and I NSW, Peter Matthews, said crops in many areas of the State were one or two more falls of rain away from suffering serious damage from water logging, and the wet conditions were also encouraging stripe rust and other diseases.
He urged farmers to keep checking their crops for signs of stripe rust in susceptible varieties, and in crops where the protection period from previous fungicide applications was expiring.
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