Heavy rainfall has fallen across parts of eastern South Australia over the past week. These rains moved in from the east as part of a deep trough that brought heavy rainfall across parts of Victoria and NSW.
Fortuitously, a high percentage of grain and hay across these northern areas of South Australia had already been baled/harvested and so quality is unlikely to be severely impacted by the unseasonal rains.
Parts of south-eastern South Australia have yet to start harvest and some second cuts of pasture and lucerne hay are still lying in paddocks waiting to be baled.
Hopefully, the rainfall totals have not been high enough to slow down baling too much and farmers can recommence this week and be completed before Christmas.
There are concerns that some of the second cut lucerne across South Australia’s central and south-east areas that had not been baled might end up having some quality issues. Time will tell.
Feed testing of this later, rain affected, baled hay will be critical.
Many farmers in South Australia were mindful that the rain was coming and last week they were flat out completing their hay and grain harvesting.
Farmers were also busy getting hay into sheds and undercover to ensure they did not run into quality problems.
The positive from all this rain is that there will still be green pasture in the south-east of South Australia which will now last longer, summer crops will get a real kick along allowing livestock and dairy farmers to defer additional supplementary feeding for a little longer.
This deferment of needing to buy in supplementary feed, whether it be hay or pellets, will allow cash flows to be stretched further for South Australia’s dairy farmers.
It will be interesting to see how hay prices respond to this ongoing rainfall.
As mentioned there has been a lot of cereal and canola crops cut for hay this year – cereal and canola hay values have been stable across the hay baling season.
Protein hays such as lucerne and vetch remain tight and prices continue to be firm.
Given the firm hay values so far this season, demand for hay remain sluggish as dairy and livestock farmers look to utilise their own home grown pastures.
This trend is expected to continue into the early part of 2019.
South Australia’s dairy farmers appear comfortable in pushing their hay needs back for the moment.
Next autumn should be when demand starts to pick up again, when pastures stop growing and temperatures turn colder.
