The Australian Ministry of Agriculture in Aparis revised upward its forecast for the 2020-2021 wheat harvest to a record 33.3 million tons.
This is 2.1 million tons more than the previous harvest forecast in December 2020. It doubles the wheat harvest in 2019-2020, when total production in Australia was 15.2 million tons. Abares calculated the five-year average from 2015-2016 at 21.6 million tons of wheat.
Australia had to deal with severe droughts in the previous two growing seasons, so the cereal harvests were disappointing. The previous record for wheat production was 31.8 million tons in the 2016-2017 season.
The positive adjustment of wheat yield in Australia is due to the provinces of Western Australia and New South Wales. These have the largest crops of wheat with 4.7 million hectares and 3.8 million hectares respectively. In total, nearly 13 million hectares of wheat are grown in Australia this season. That’s 27 percent more than last year, and 18 percent more than the five-year average.
Barley production in Australia was further revised up by Abares by more than 1 million tons to 13.1 million tons. This is still 0.4 million tons less than the record production of 13.5 million tons of barley in 2016-2017. This year, the area of barley increased by 400 thousand hectares, to reach 4.4 million hectares. This is 2.5 percent more than the five-year average.
