A better year for the Brownings of Australia

Rosemary and Kevin Browning farm on the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia. They are friends of Grainews and have been featured in the newspaper in past years. Rosemary sent an email last week to touch base and provide an update on the family's 2008 harvest. The photo shows the Brownings' New Holland combine, driven by son Paul, in a wheat field.

Here is Rosemary's harvest report:

After good opening rains we commenced seeding on May 13. With some follow up moisture, the crops looked promising until September when we needed a finishing rain. It never came. October 28 we cut the canola and started reaping barley on October 30, a relatively early start. On December 9 we finished reaping, but still had grain to cart to the port silos up to 35 km from the home farm. Barley, canola, wheat, durum, peas, lentils and triticale were harvested.

Surprisingly the yields were a good average and also the quality of the grain. Flagship Barley was up to 71 bushels an acre (on a smaller paddock we got 90 bushels) and considering that we have experienced several years of drought and a dry finish, we were pleased with the results.

Prices are fluctuating. At the start of harvest the lentils were AU$1,100 per tonne, during harvest the price dropped to AU$900 per tonne (the excuse was that Canada had a surplus of lentils) and today, January 14, they were AU$1,200 per tonne. We sold.

Our single desk marketing has been taken away from the farmers resulting in unstable prices offered from the private buyers. This is a disastrous step backward for the growers, back to the 1930s.

The canola oil content was 48.9 per cent and the durum has 17 per cent protein, an excellent sample.  Fuel prices are still high and the fertilizer prices for seeding were frightening and still increasing. Guess we will just keep on farming!