Top chickpea crop will face global competition say traders

Agronomist Andrew Arthur, Goondiwindi, said the correct amount of moisture has fallen at the right time to produce plants with superb growth and warm winter temperatures have induced flowering in early-planted chickpeas.

“Until now our district has had very little to nil disease,” Mr Arthur said.

“We’ve had something like six frosts this winter is almost ridiculous when you consider that 30 frosts are normal,” he said.

Expected rain this week would play nicely into the hands of those growers along the NSW – Queensland border who were looking for moisture to fill out crops.

Of course the situation was very different in the southern chickpea areas and Pulse Australia agronomist Phil Bowden said some areas were not too bad, but in other areas there had been a major effect.

Crops grown on well drained soil “looked good”, he said.

“In areas that are less well-drained, such as the flood plains around Warren and Walgett where the chickpeas are grown on grey clay soils there have been considerable losses from waterlogging."

In fact the demand from southern chickpea growers for fungicides to control debilitating asochyta blight and botrytis grey mould was competing strongly for limited stocks being sought by the horticulture industry.

But in many of those cases there was no way of getting on the wet ground to spray leaving producers to consider more expensive aerial application.

Despite such worries crop forecast figures still tip Australia to produce 1.5 million tonnes of chickpeas this season, up from one million tonnes last year as a result of an 80 per cent increase in planting on the back of stunning prices in the order of $1000 a tonne, said Mr Bowden.

And Goondiwindi’s Mr Arthur said if the season maintains in the north producers could expect increased production of 2t/ha, up on a normal year of 1.5t/ha.

But the chance of any crop getting the equivalent of $1000/t that chickpeas were getting earlier this year was highly unlikely as a result of increased stock world-wide, said Nidera pulse trader Rob Brealey.

Competing with the high quality Desi variety that would come off the good paddocks come October were an earlier crop of Tanzanian Desi chickpeas.

Russia was expecting a large crop of the smaller Kabouli variety while in Canada good growing conditions would yield an excellent harvest of yellow peas.

Both Kabouli and yellow peas were regularly substituted for Desi chickpeas to make pulse flour on the Indian subcontinent, Mr Brealey said.

Meanwhile, India’s monsoon was working this year, laying down excellent soil moisture ahead of planting at the same time as our harvest – so the outlook for chickpeas down the track could be bearish.

Of course there are many factors at play, Mr Brealey said and it would be only a “guess” to suggest prices at harvest. But he did concede that $800/t and even less could be a reality.

“Those are still very good prices,” said Mr Brealey, putting the price fall into perspective.