POLITICAL instability and cash trouble in Egypt has led to low export demand for faba beans, despite a good growing season for much of the state’s crop.
Earlier this week faba beans fetched $300 a tonne delivered to packers at Narrabri and Dubbo, and $325/t on the Darling Downs, between $100 and $150 less than last year’s season, when the container market ranged from $400/t to $500/t.
Between 50,000 and 60,000 hectares are being grown in NSW. Pulse Australia industry development manager Phil Bowden, Cootamundra, said the southern NSW crop – between 20,000ha and 25,000ha – had increased by about 20 per cent on previous years.
Growers are expecting good yields thanks to a wet, mild winter, but continued wet weather had caused fungal disease issues with growers having at least two or three fungicide sprays for chocolate spot.
“Nearly all the crops I’ve seen are looking excellent,” Mr Bowden said.
“In southern NSW crops are in the middle of flowering at the moment and they’ll get their first pods in the next few weeks.”
AgVantage Commodities director Steve Dalton, Narrabri, said growers were pleased with their crops but there was no good news with prices.
“Egypt is our major destination for export beans and Egypt’s economy has been in difficult times over the past 12 to 18 months because of political unrest, and Australian traders got into contractual difficulty with buyers in Egypt,” Mr Dalton said.
“So we’ve got reluctance from traders wanting to take the risk and deal with those buyers due to financial difficulty. Also, a lot of the packers are going to have such a big chickpea program this year that they won’t want to deal with faba beans, so that’s all combining to make faba bean exports difficult this year.”
Mr Dalton said he didn’t expect to improve at or following harvest.
“Hopefully we'll find some domestic demand but we expect there’s more chance of faba beans declining on the back of the size of supply versus demand. The only way that will be turned around is if we see a major improvement in demand from Egypt.”
Some growers will choose to store faba beans until after the chickpea crop has been sold, been even that may not be worthwhile.
”A lot of growers who stored them last year for the same reason are still holding them today,” Mr Dalton said.
“If growers can sell them, there’s still the potential to make money out of faba beans because they sould have very good yields. If they can sell them for $250 from the farm or better, I think they'll make money out of them, plus they’ll get the agronomic benefits of growing faba beans.”
Improved soil health could be the biggest benefit of this year’s crop. Faba beans have been part of the rotation at “Belah”, Wee Waa, for the past five years, where Jeff and Bernadette Hamblin focus on improving nitrogen and overall soil health for their main crop, cotton.
“Our primary goal is the cotton crop and any returns from the faba beans is secondary,” Mr Hamblin said.
“We’re just happy if we can cover the costs of harvest and growing them.”
Mr Hamblin said he focused on large biomass for increased nitrogen fixation.
“Our cotton yields have increased by one to two bales a hectare since we started using faba beans in the rotation.”
