WET WEATHER may have limited chickpea plantings in some areas, but the chairman of Pulse Australia says the rain has set up the industry for a year that could dwarf previous chickpea production records.
Peter Wilson estimates there could be up to a million hectares of chickpeas planted across the nation, significantly up on the 2015 plant of 662,000ha, which itself was easily a record plant.
“This is not an official Pulse Australia estimate and some people will think the numbers are on the high side, but there have been a lot of late plantings as people look for alternatives to cereals, which have dreadful prices at present.
Late rain has meant large acreages have been planted in the last month in areas such as north-west NSW, the eastern Darling Downs and Central Queensland.
Mr Wilson said based on trend line chickpea yields nationally of 1.5 tonnes a hectare a record crop of 1.5 million tonnes could be achieved.
“This sounds high, but I think with the 60mm recently over the eastern Darling Downs it is achievable.”
There have been paddocks lost to excess moisture in northern NSW, Mr Wilson said, but overall he said the upside by far outweighed the downside.
“We saw it get too wet last year for chickpeas in southern NSW and we found the crops generally came out of it OK, especially those that had received an early nitrogen application.”
In terms of the wet in northern NSW, B&W Rural Moree agronomist Brad Donald said the big wet would see some acres diverted to summer crop, but added overall it was not a major problem.
He said there had which has seen a steady stream of rainfall across the region since June 2 but it has not damaged existing crop.
“The problems are more in trafficability for paddocks due to be planted.”
“The chickpea planting window is drawing to a close so if there is more rain over the next ten days that will be about it in terms of plantings,” he said.
He said any late sown crops would also have some yield potential losses compared with those sown on time, however he added most crop in was looking good.
Nick Crundall, assistant pool manager with grains business MarketCheck, said there were some washed out chickpea crops through NSW, with the Central West region in particular very wet, but added it was difficult to get a handle on the overall impact.
“We definitely don’t require any more rain, but in terms of damage I’m not sure there are large scale problems.”
Sanjiv Dubey, chickpea marketer with Graintrend, said in spite of the wet through the Central West and dry conditions on the Darling Downs which prevented plantings, the national chickpea crop was in good condition.
“The prices have meant there is a large plant.”
In good news for growers, he said he expected new crop chickpea prices to hold up well, in spite of Indian government intervention.
“There are fantastic prices on offer for immediate shipments to the subcontinent of over $1300 a tonne,” Mr Dubey said.
“The new crop price won’t be at that level, but there are signs there that the Indian government will be happy with prices of $850-900/t, which is still fantastic based on historical averages.”
Mr Dubey said as part of measures to bring down chickpea prices, the Indian government had abolished new crop futures contracts on its National Commodities Exchange (NCDEX).
“It has taken the transparency out of the market, and the Indian buyers are also hearing of a bigger crop here in Australia, so they are bearish factors, however, the figures we hear the Indian government are happy with are still very strong.”
