As Australia's winter harvest of wheat, barley and canola gathers pace, farmers are counting the cost of recent hot, dry weather and bracing in some areas for swarms of locusts.
AWB Ltd, the national exporter of the premier winter crop, said on Friday that recent poor weather likely reduced the crop to the lower end of the group's forecast range, of between 21 and 24 million tonnes.
"At this stage it's probably closer to the lower end of that range than the upper," AWB spokesman Peter McBride told Reuters.
The Queensland farmers association, AgForce, said on Friday that prolonged drought had devastated this year's winter wheat harvest in the state one of the smaller producing areas costing growers an estimated A$100 million (US $75 million).
The states now expected to harvest about 900,000 tonnes of wheat, down from normal yields of 1.6 million tonnes, AgForce grains President Murray Jones said. Harvesting in northern New South Wales's state was producing good yields and quality, but AWB's McBride was cautious: "It's only days still.
We're waiting for the harvest to really kick in November and December." A 21 million tonne wheat crop in the current April to March year would be well down from last year's record 25 million tonnes, but still up on the five-year average of 20.6 million tonnes.
This would leave Australia with around 16 million tonnes for export, around the same as Canada, tied in second place behind the world's leading exporter, the United States. Other Australian crops have also been hit by weather.
The canola harvest is underway in northern New South Wales, with yield and oil content highly variable, according to GrainCorp Ltd, the eastern grain storage and trading group.
The Canola Association of Australia last week cut its forecast of the crop by 15 percent to 1.34 million tonnes.
With the barley harvest underway in northern areas but yet to start in the south, Australian Wheat Forecasters on Thursday cut its estimate of the crop by 3.4 percent to 7.17 million tonnes, because of dry weather.
Meanwhile, a serious outbreak of locusts still poses a threat to Australia's eastern winter crops, even though authorities say they are on top of the battle against the insects.
The Australian Plague Locust Commission, which is operating in outback areas west of the main crops, said on Friday that juvenile hoppers were being mopped up, and aerial spraying would soon attack flying swarms expected in northern New South Wales.
A spokesman for the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, which is fighting the locusts in cropping areas more to the east, said northern areas had been brought under control but Dubai and other central parts of the state were hot spots.
Adult locusts were yet to form flying swarms, he said. "There's no reports coming in of mass crop destruction or anything like that," New South Wales Plague Locust Commissioner Graeme Eggleston told Reuters on Friday. "Where they are in crops we are treating them, and quite successfully," he said.