Australia: Northern trucks, trade busy with pulses

A big and fast-paced shipping program for chickpeas and faba beans is limiting the amount of feed wheat and barley being sold and executed in the northern market, where cereal values have eased in the past week.

In the south, the barley harvest is gathering pace, and a surprisingly large percentage of early crops are said to be making malting grades and the feed market’s favourite, BAR1.

The NSW wheat harvest is also ramping up, and early indications point to plenty of lower-protein deliveries, which has stockfeed millers confident of local supplies to fill their 2025 requirements.

Consumers are generally seen as adequately covered into February, with anticipation of the pulse task in the north, and lower-than-average yields in much of the south, prompting them to cover their Christmas-New Year needs some weeks ago.

The southern feed-type wheat and barley markets have therefore fallen,

Table 1: Indicative prices in Australian dollars per tonne.

Faba beans have joined chickpeas as the most-traded commodity in the northern harvest slot.

With a number of faba and chickpea cargoes booked to load in coming weeks, plus container business, trade sources say trucks are being kept busy shuttling pulses to packers, accumulation points, and the ports of Brisbane and Newcastle.

AgVantage Commodities principal broker Steve Dalton said the flow-on effect to freight is supporting values for a number of commodities.

“I think we’re starting to see the market strengthen on the back of chickpeas,” Mr Dalton said.

“Growers are going to pay to get a truck, or the trade is going to pay up.”

Product needs to get to NSW or Qld ports by January in order to ensure being discharged in India ahead of its slated tariff-free cut-off in March.

“Because of the scarcity of trucks, and we knew this was going to happen, this year…the carriers are forcing growers more than ever before.

“Trucks are dictating to the farmer where they’ll go and what they’ll do; the grower doesn’t have a choice.”

With offshore demand strong for faba beans, and production in South Australia looking limited after its dry and frost-affected growing season, export demand from the north is strong.

“I’ve never seen as many faba bean buyers in the northern market.”

Prices for fabas are now at around $435/t delivered up-country site, up roughly $35/t in the past week or two, with growers keen to jump on the market while the export demand is there.

Mr Dalton said growers were selling chickpeas off the header, plus canola, faba beans, and “a little bit of wheat”.

Feedlots are generally well covered, with many using their own grain from the bumper harvest now at full tilt in southern Qld, or sourcing from neighbours who are regular suppliers.

Early reports from the northern NSW harvest are of some Hard and Prime Hard, and plenty of ASW and APW, with the latter two grades typical of the soft growing season.

Reasonable volumes of barley are being harvested in northern Victoria, southern and central NSW, and South Australia.

According to MaltNews, as published by consultant Trevor Perryman and Riordan Grain Services,  most of the Qld and northern NSW barley harvest is in, and malting selection rates are reaching historic levels.

The usual split between malting and feed is expected in Victoria, and significantly low rates of selection are being reported in Western Australia, and presumably similar levels are being seen in South Australia.

MaltNews puts the national barley crop at 11.46 million tonnes (Mt).

“Although the total availability of Australian malting barley is forecast to be close to its average 3Mt, more than 70 percent of it will be in the eastern states.

“WA and SA, normally big exporters of malting barley, could either be short malting barley for domestic maltsters or have the grain in the wrong zones, as…seems to be the case in the Esperance region of WA.

“If the forecasts turn out to be correct, this will certainly disrupt the plans of many in the trade.”

That disruption could include SA and WA drawing malting from Vic and NSW, and feed barley from both states is already in demand in SA.

Early barley crops in the Vic-NSW border area are making BAR1, but some are showing lighter testweights and screenings, to reflect a dry season and/or frost damage.

“It might be that the better crops are the early ones,” one trader said.

Some early dryland barley crops from NSW-Vic border regions are yielding 3.5-4t/ha, with BAR1 being snapped up by local consumers who expect higher screenings and lighter testweights might become all too common as the Vic barley harvest gathers pace.

Canola and barley are the major crops being harvested in the southern half of NSW, and canola at around $770-$780/t delivered depot is the preferred cash crop.

Growers with malting barley to sell are enjoying its premium over feed, and growers generally are reticent to forward sell any of their crops due to concerns about the potential impact of frost and lack of moisture on quality.

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Tags: Market, faba beans, sorghum, feed wheat, harvest, barley, prices, chickpeas, yields