Wheat growers are facing typical price discounts of up to $35 a tonne as AWB reverts to its old formula of strict grain grading categories that offer no incremental payment incentives for quality.

Golden Rewards provided a sliding quality payment scale to growers for protein and moisture content and screenings, rather than “cliff-face” pricing where grain suffers severe price penalties if it falls below set limits in these quality parameters.

The changes back to cliff-face pricing were proposed in June by the National Agricultural Commodities Marketing Association (NACMA) in its draft standards for 2008-09 grain receivals.

The Federal Government, as part of removing AWB’s single desk wheat export powers, has handed AWB’s former role of setting and maintaining wheat quality standards to NACMA.

The potential impact of losing Golden Rewards payments is starting to sink in among growers, with the issue taking up a large slab of time at last week’s AWB grower information meeting at Young.

The Young meeting was one of a round of NSW sessions held to inform growers about constitutional changes to be voted on at an extraordinary general meeting on August 21.

Former GrainCorp and Grain Growers Association board member, Ross Flanery, Galong – a deregulation supporter and one of a group of growers who originally successfully campaigned for what became the Golden Rewards system – said the loss to growers could be “enormous”.

He said if Australian Hard or Prime Hard wheat was downgraded to General Purpose because of 5.1 per cent screenings, rather than at the five per cent limit, farmers could face price discounts of $30 to $35 a tonne.

“That’s 10 per cent of your income just because of that 0.1pc,” he said.

But the system would also allow a grain handler such as GrainCorp to blend the slightly out-of-specifications grain with better quality grain for a considerable financial gain.

Member and former chairman of the NSW Farmers Association grains committee, John Ridley, Burcher, said growers would be “dreadfully disadvantaged” by the removal of Golden Rewards.