Region lands in top-five report

Grain growing seems to be going through a golden era, or at least the land it is grown in.

Elders released its second annual ‘Top Five Cropping Regions’ report and the Wimmera and Mallee came in a very impressive second in the nation, behind north-west NSW. So how do they come up with the top five? Author of the report, Elders market insights specialist Matt Ough, admits it is a fun and hypothetical calculation based on the predominant cropping region’s quarterly compound average growth rate for the year.

It lists the Wimmera and Mallee’s major rural centres to include Charlton, Hopetoun, Horsham, Kaniva, Kerang, Mildura, Ouyen and Swan Hill.

It says the five-year compound average growth rate is 19.7 percent and the rolling one-year median price per hectare averaged a quarterly increase of 7.6 percent in 2022.

The first report, last year, placed the Wimmera and Mallee fifth on the list. So how did we rocket up the ranks? “The rolling one-year median price per hectare averaged a quarterly increase of two percent in 2021, but in 2022 the region averaged growth of 7.6 percent per quarter. The key change for the region was a greater proportion of sales in the higher-price Wimmera region in 2022 compared with 2021. The obvious driver of confidence in the region was high grain prices and exceptional yields,” Mr Ough told Country Today.

There are two new entrants into the top five which are worthy of further consideration.

Firstly, there is the Riverina Murray, taking in the regional towns of Albury, Wagga Wagga, Deniliquin, Griffith and Young. In the past few decades there’s been a huge shift from livestock production to predominantly cropping.

The other is the Mid North and Yorke Peninsula of South Australia.

As a South Australian, those areas used to be dry, arid station country zones that were predominantly merino country.

When we drove through the Yorke Peninsula to family fishing holidays on the coast, we would feel sorry for the sight through the heat haze of 30 mobs of merino wethers crammed under what little shade they could find.

Now, Mr Ough says, the multinational corporates are buying up big to turn it into pure cropping country.

Such have our cropping practices evolved over recent decades that land once considered marginal at best can produce profitable crops.

I’m just grateful that I made my life-changing tree change to the country nine years ago, before the property boom took off.

It must be daunting for any young farmer wanting to strike out on their own.

Still, where there’s a will, there’s a way.