{"id":413775,"date":"2026-01-15T03:44:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T03:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/413775\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T03:44:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T03:44:13","slug":"drought-hit-grain-growers-make-every-drop-of-rain-count","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/413775\/","title":{"rendered":"Drought-hit grain growers make every drop of rain count"},"content":{"rendered":"

New techniques and technology is allowing southern NSW grain growers to produce a harvest, despite significantly below-average rainfall.<\/p>\n

Farming country around Griffith would normally receive up to 450 millimetres of annual rainfall but in 2025 it was just 200mm.<\/p>\n

Agronomist Barry Haskins said the lack of rain made it tough for croppers.<\/p>\n

“It wasn’t a good year harvest-wise; we were below average on our production,” he said.<\/p>\n

“But it is amazing what we were able to produce on such little moisture.”<\/p>\n

Farmer Matthew Molloy planted 7,000 hectares of canola, wheat, barley and vetch crops on his farms at Rankins Springs, north-east of Griffith.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Matthew Molloy has produced a crop despite dry weather. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

“We’d always say that if we don’t get 150 mm of in-crop rain that you’d really struggle,” Mr Molloy said.<\/p>\n

There was just 90 mm of rain during the growing season.<\/p>\n

Mr Molloy said yields were below average but he felt “lucky” to be able to harvest something in such a dry year.<\/p>\n

“At the end of the day, I’ll come out a little bit behind but that’s a lot better than coming out a long way behind.”<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

Growers were still able to harvest a crop. (ABC Rural: Emily Doak)<\/p>\n

New techniques preserve moisture<\/p>\n

Mr Haskins said farming practices had changed since the millennium drought to allow farmers to do more with less water.<\/p>\n

“The big thing has been looking at how we conserve moisture and how we keep that in the soil,” he said.<\/p>\n

That has involved switching from ploughing paddocks to minimum tillage and stubble conservation practices.<\/p>\n

Minimum tillage involves shallow cultivation rather than deep ploughing, which improves soil structure and increases water filtration.<\/p>\n

Stubble conservation is when farmers leave crop residue on the surface of the soil, rather than removing it.<\/p>\n

It then forms a protective mulch, which reduces water evaporation.<\/p>\n

Mr Molloy said the techniques had made a big difference on his property.<\/p>\n

“In the last five years, we’ve managed to build up a lot of stubble and organic matter on top of the soil which I think definitely helped us this year with less evaporation,” he said.<\/p>\n

Technology makes a difference<\/p>\n

Mr Molloy is also making the most of new technology, using weed spraying robots to cut down on labour and herbicide costs.<\/p>\n

“We can target specific weed species,” he said. “Negligible weeds growing in the paddocks means we get to retain 100 per cent of the rainfall for our crops.”<\/p>\n

The information gathered from soil moisture probes is also used to decide which part of his farm to crop.<\/p>\n

“Probably around 25 per cent of the farm we took out [of production] because at seeding time there was no subsoil moisture,” Mr Molloy said.<\/p>\n

At Milbrulong, south-west of Wagga Wagga, Brent Alexander said retaining soil moisture over summer made a big difference.<\/p>\n

“We used to curse at the rainfall coming in the summertime because you’re out spraying [weeds] but we’ve started to realise that if moisture turns up, you capture it whenever it comes,” he said.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Brent Alexander has invested in new machinery to manage crop stubble better. (ABC News: Emily Doak)<\/p>\n

He said a decision to invest more than $100,000 in a stripper front for his harvester was paying dividends.<\/p>\n

“The stripper stubble, just being that bit taller and shading the ground, has kept the ground a lot cooler and retained a lot more moisture,” he said.<\/p>\n

Mr Haskins said another lesson in the past year was the value of having a good rotation, including pulse crops and fresh paddocks.<\/p>\n

“We saw yields of double where crops were in good rotation,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Some farmers were stripping 2.5 tonnes of canola and five tonnes of wheat in small patches where everything was right, and they had the same rain as anyone else.”<\/p>\n

He said that the development of high-yielding and more drought-tolerant crop varieties was also helping growers cope with dry years.<\/p>\n

“What we can achieve comparative to what we were growing even 10 years ago is a credit to the breeders and the companies,” Mr Haskins said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New techniques and technology is allowing southern NSW grain growers to produce a harvest, despite significantly below-average rainfall.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6634,64,63,99,32716,47449,4358,77403,61833,102349,105,4255],"class_list":["post-413775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-agriculture","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-canola","tag-crops","tag-drought","tag-grain","tag-harvest","tag-riverina","tag-technology","tag-wheat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}