seasonal australian crop snapshot, page-4

Feed demand is only increasing from what I can see. A big factor this year, and it was unexpected, was a huge demand for sorghum from China. They have taken 100s of thousands of tonnes out of the system, and believe it or not, a lot of it is getting turned into alcohol, and it looks like it could be ongoing. Free range chooks are less efficient at converting feed, so that's all good.

We currently grow twice as much summer crop as wheat. The sorghum on average would yield twice what the wheat does. I suppose the wheat is used mainly as a rotation for the sorghum, much like you blokes grow canola for the rotation benefits?

Cotton has now been grown within 10 ks of us, so we could probably grow cotton in the future. Dryland corn does really well here and we've grown heaps in years past. It generally yields a bit less, and is worth a bit more than sorghum, so we could swap to that if the demand was there, but it's not currently, as the feed market here is set up for sorghum and not corn. We grew soybeans 25 years ago dryland and they were a disaster. They need regular small amounts of rain, not the few big dumps of rain we seem to get, and they don't seem to have a root system that will chase the water, but that was 25 years ago and apparently they are improved now?