Harvest is over for another year with 9.5m tonnes of grain delivered in Western Australia. Looking over the past three years, it was an average season. In 2011 the state produced 15m tonnes and in 2010 it produced 5m.

What the season did show was just how variable the weather is becoming depending on what side of the climate debate you sit. This variability is having a big impact on farm viability and, subsequently, the confidence of Australian farmers.

If I look back over the past 17 years I have been farming, I have witnessed a huge change in the structure of farms. Most farms were father-and-son operations running livestock and croppping and it used to take six weeks to plant the crop and just as long to take it off. If you had to spray the crop more than once, you had a real problem and after you harvested the crop you put the grain into a pool and watched the money roll in over the next 18 months.

Now the situation is vastly different. Most of the grain belt doesn’t run livestock anymore and farms are four times the size they where. They employ full time labourers and many seasonal workers during drilling and harvest. It still takes six weeks to put in and take off the crop, but it’s four to six times the area it was and the boomspray irrigator never stops working. In a deregulated market, farmers are now also grain traders with a large proportion of sales being cash at harvest.

This has brought about a large change in debt and risk with both now substantially higher than ever before. So how are farmers going to cope with seasonal variability? I guess we are going to find out, because if the past 17 years is anything to go by the next 17 are going to change even faster.

Rob Warburton farms 3,000ha with his wife Jen and two daughters in Kojonup, below Perth in Western Australia. Cropping includes wheat, barley and oilseed rape. Wildflower seed is grown for retail. Merino sheep are reared for wool and meat.

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