After three summers of dwindling rice production, growers are flocking in droves to pre-sowing advisory meetings in droves as the rain-blessed South West NSW prepares for a 300 per cent jump in planting area.
Even the prospect of a potential fall in medium grain rice payments by almost $100 a tonne (about 25 per cent) for the 2016-17 season has not cooled optimism.
Most major supply dams including Hume, Burrinjuck, Blowering, Lake Victoria and Dartmouth are spilling or near full, water allocation prospects for irrigators are rising and water trade prices are down around $110 a megalitre - about half the cost of a year ago.
“Everybody’s looking forward to getting back into growing a decent crop again,” said Rice Growers Association of Australia (RGA) president, Jeremy Morton at Moulamein, whose organisation represents about 800 rice farming families.
“There won’t be too many who don’t grow rice this year - it will be a significant increase in planting areas.
“Pre-sowing meetings in the past week have recorded the biggest attendance numbers seen in years.”
Mr Morton, who intends to plant about 200 hectares after growing no rice last year on his Murray Valley mixed sheep, beef and grain property “Riversley”, said unlike last year few farmers in his valley needed to tap into any of their water allocations to irrigate winter crops this year, leaving plenty of headroom for summer crop water use.
At current market values, buying water would cost about $1200 a hectare less than 2015-16 year, making rice much more competitive against other southern crops competing for allocations, including the expanding nut and cotton sector.
Last season many growers sold their limited water allocations to cotton irrigators, leaving SunRice to process just 244,000 tonnes - down from 690,000t in 2015 and 830,000t for 2014.
This summer’s crop yields are tipped to rebound to yield around 800,000t from a forecast 80,000ha planting.
Although increasing global rice stocks and a 34pc lift in medium grain plantings in California to 206,000ha were undermining rice markets, Mr Morton said rice was still a key factor in most farms’ enterprise mix, representing about 50pc of his own income in an average year.
Apart from lower water costs this season, the crop rotation advantages of rice and the benefits of a damp soil profile when follow-up winter crops were sown on time meant irrigated rice margins were worth more than the face value of the rice market.
The long timespan over which the pooled 2017 harvest would be sold was also likely to be an advantage because global commodity markets may be rising again in a year’s time.
