Almost 100 growers and industry personnel attended an Ashburton workshop yesterday which provided a platform for the Arable Industry Marketing Initiative (AIMI) to deliver the inaugural results from a farmer survey, a quarterly study which has been developed to combat the lack of market information currently available for the arable sector.
The results provide information on the production, sales, planting and on-farm stocks of wheat, barley, oats and maize grains in New Zealand.
Planting
There are no comparative statistics available as yet on which to produce estimates of year-to-year changes in areas of autumn-sown cereal crops; future surveys will make such estimates possible. However, estimations based on the survey data would suggest autumn plantings for the 2011 harvest to be 34,168 ha wheat, 21,408 ha barley and 438 ha oats.
Sales
Most of the cereal crops harvested in summer/autumn 2010 had been sold by September 1 2010, although approximately 25 percent of all feed barley, feed oats and milling oats, and 20 percent of milling wheat remained unsold at that time. In total, 98,000 tonnes of feed barley, 51,000 tonnes of feed wheat and 27,000 tonnes of milling wheat remained uncommitted. Six percent of total wheat sales and 11 percent of malting barley sales between harvest 2010 and September 1 2010 comprised stocks carried over from previous harvests.
Almost all milling and malting crops sold during the period were contracted for sale before harvest as might be expected (96 percent of wheat and barley and all oats and maize), and most of the free-price sales of these commodities were of stocks carried over from previous harvests. However, although only small quantities of feed oats and maize are traded at a free price, approximately half of all feed wheat and barley were uncontracted at harvest.
On-farm stocks
Cereal volumes in excess of half the volumes harvested in 2010 remained in storage on-farm as at September 1 2010. Over 60 percent of wheat and oats, 56 percent of barley, but only 6 percent of maize (almost exclusively milling maize) harvested was still on farm at this time. However, in all cases more than half the volume stored on-farm had already been sold. With the exception of milling wheat (11 percent), less than eight percent of the sold grain stored on farm had been sold on pre-harvest contracts.
Production
One of the key findings from this initial survey was that the total areas of all crops, with exception to oats, were higher in 2009 than in 2010. The estimated total areas of wheat and barley declined proportionately more than total crop volumes, reflecting higher average yields in 2010, while the estimated average yield of oats remained the same but both the area and volume increased slightly. Maize grain experienced the largest estimated percentage reduction in crop area and in production between years, and average yield also declined in 2010.
Survey respondents reported a 26 percent reduction in 2010 from the 2009 harvest in the area of maize silage harvested. Of the total area harvested, 81.2 percent had been contracted before harvest, 13.6 percent was sold at a free price after harvest and 4.6 percent had been used on-farm.
Professor Tony Zwart of Zwart & Associates has been responsible for implementing this work; he said "we need to ensure that growers, end users and all market participants are able to take advantage of world markets and business opportunities that arise. With efficient distribution, better information and appropriate contracts we should be able to do this."
Survey results - first step towards resolving market uncertainty
