Record wheat crop for Western Australia, says Rob Warburton

Western Australia harvested its largest crop on record this year, with just over 15m tonnes of grain in storage. That’s half of Australia’s record 30m tonnes. The interesting point in all this is the price of feed grain.
We have seen one of the wettest years on record, as well as one of the wettest harvests on record, spoiling both grain quality and quantity. Traditionally less than 1% of its grain is downgraded to feed due to the usual hot dry harvest. This year that figure rose to 15%.
Traditionally, this has meant a price penalty of up to $70/t (£47) between milling and feed, but this year the difference was only $15 (£10). Even less in barley with feed trading $5 to $10 (£3.40-6.70) above malt. A year ago the world was starving and there was a “global food crisis” – apparently not this year.
I think the rest of the world has been seeing this price convergence for some time and it’s only just hit us in Western Australia. When travelling through America during my Nuffield scholarship in 2010, feed grain for the protein markets dominated local production. While these grains were mostly maize and soya bean, as the production of grain starts hitting their peak, wheat and barley are going to come under pressure.
There’s no doubt that pork and chicken are becoming the food of choice in the protein market world-wide, due to their high conversion rate of feed to meat. On the other end of the scale, sheep and cattle are becoming the food of the wealthy. In our local shops lamb is four times the cost it was five years ago, but chicken breasts have stayed the same at $10/kg (£6.70).
My solution is: try and capture the best of both worlds by moving more production to grass-fed lamb and shifting grain production away from milling wheat to feed wheat.