The watered-down seed yield

Extreme weather has left those in the seed industry looking at their worst yield in more than 30 years.

Conditions for the seed crops were far from ideal as rain lashed Marlborough in late February, right before the March harvest.

Compounding the problems, when the seed crops needed rain in late spring, there wasn’t enough of it.

Seddon seed grower David Hammond said there could be big losses if the bad weather continued.

‘‘We got fine weather when we normally harvest grain such as barley in late January and early February. The small seed harvest, like lusen seed and clover seed will run into trouble if this weather continues.

‘‘In a lot of cases there’s quite a bit of money tied up into the small seeds business, so we wouldn’t like to see that happen,’’ Hammond said.

It had been a ‘‘long time’’ since the region had a start to the year as wet as 2018, he said.

‘‘If we get another cyclone coming down or if we catch the edge of them it could be quite serious.

‘‘In the mid-70s we had conditions similar to this ... when we had the remnants of a cyclone come through. So it’s not common to have this kind of weather and it’s relatively early into autumn too which is a worry,’’ Hammond said.

Hammond said his farm received about 200 millimetres of rain in the first two months of the year, about half of the annual rainfall for his farm.

Kiwi Seed managing director Bruce Clark did not remember rainfall as bad as this year in his time in the industry.

‘‘We’ve been here 33 years, I would suggest it’s the worst year we’ve ever had.

‘‘What usually happens in a case like that is you don’t get the yield you would expect. For us we don’t get as much to sell, it’s just one of those things where we have to accept ups and downs but this year was particularly bad,’’ Clark said.

The high humidity was another factor, he said.

‘‘We like the humidity below 50 [per cent] and we’ve been around 70 and 80 [per cent], which is Auckland weather,’’ Clark said.

He was hopeful to get away with minimal losses.

‘‘We are fairly resilient but we wouldn’t want another year like this, it’s so much nicer having the hot, dry Marlborough summer,’’ Clark said.

There were about 25 grain and seed growers in Marlborough, he said.

The region was ‘‘generally blessed’’ with good autumns, Hammond said.