Farmers pray for rain 

While February and March also had below average rainfall, April had just 12.2 millimetres of rain, a whooping 16.2 below its average. 

Agronomist Paul Parker said the quandary for farmers was whether to ‘dry sow’ now and risk seeds germinating and dying before the rains come or to hold off and risk leaving it until the weather becomes too cold.

“For farmers it is a balancing act to know which way to go,” he said. “It’s a big decision for farmers to make and given the difficult finances that many of them are in, it becomes even more difficult.”

Some farmers had sown after February rains and made reasonable growth but crops were now suffering from moisture stress.

“The west part is under more stress than the rest of the shire but it’s all under stress,” he said. 

“Farmers are under stress as well.”

Mr Parker said this year’s conditions were compounded by a dry summer and previous winter which had left the sub soil extremely dried out. 

 Average rainfall for the rest of the season would overcome the problems farmers were facing, he said, but if it was a cold winter growth could still be affected.

As for whether farmers could expect drier conditions over the next over the next couple of years, Mr Parker said it was possible. 

“I’m concerned that given we’re in a neutral pattern that we could change into an El Nino pattern quickly,” he said. “The fact we are going to go into a very dry winter, the effect of that could certainly extend into next year.” 

As for pastures, he said warmer than average weather in recent months, along with the lack of rain and strong winds had dried the ground down significantly, which was impacting on current growth and would continue into the winter. 

Mr Parker said stock owners may be forced to carry out supplementary feeding throughout the coming season.

“Unfortunately many local land holders do not have large reserves of fodder which could force them to have to bring in feed or look at reducing stock numbers to get through the winter,” he said.

Bribbaree farmer, John Drum of “Moonbucca”, has been forced to sow only one of his paddocks, despite wanting to do more.

John and his wife Nola have only sown grazing oats in one of their paddocks of 60 hectares where germination is far from sight. They have no plans to sow anymore because it is “just too dry”.

His share farmer, on the other hand, is just waiting to see what the weather will do.

“It certainly is very dry – there are huge cracks in the ground,” Mr Drum said. “Ideally we’d like to do another 100 acres but not at the moment - we might wait and see later.”

John admitted the situation was very grim but was still hopeful as there was plenty of the season left.

“The positive thing is that we haven’t had much rain in summer or the beginning of autumn so if we get our average yearly rain, we’ve got a lot of rain to come,” he said.

Farmers had been forced to get rid of stock and there had been enormous slumps in mutton and wool prices because of low stock feed due to the almost six-month long dry spell.

“It’s like ‘meals on wheels’ for stock with most farmers putting a feed cart on the end of their utes and using the grain they have stored in silos,” Mr Drum said.

Meanwhile, farmer David Davidson of ‘Yarran’ in Milvale said his land had “certainly” been affected but he had been cautiously sowing wheat since the small rains at end of February. 

He said he’d sown about 15 percent of a full program and would wait to sow the rest later in the month.

“It’s hedging our bets each way,” he said. “If we wait until it does rain, we have too many tractor hours and we’ll get too behind, so we make the calculated decision to sow a portion of crops in dry conditions reasonably assured that we’ll get rain by the end of May to make it worthwhile.” 

Mr Davidson said with good rainfall for the rest of the season, it was almost as good as sowing in the moist.

However, he said he was also short of stock feed and having to get in supplementary feeding, which was an added expense, and surface water in his dams were low.