By Chris Sounness
What the data network shows
This season was set up in the first two days of March. A storm band put 27 millimetres into Nhill, 40 into Rupanyup and 41 into Rainbow, into a dry profile eight weeks before a seeder moved. Season-to-date rainfall across the BushLinx network, 1 March to 27 August, now reads 202 millimetres at Nhill, 212 at Rainbow, 252 at Kaniva and 274 at Rupanyup. Solid, without being a record.
Distribution has made this year rather than volume. August delivered 40 to 57 millimetres in three separate falls, around the 9th, the 19th and the 25th, and neither Rupanyup nor Nhill reached 20 degrees on any day of the month. The warmest reading at either was 18.1.
Cool conditions have held crop water use down while repeated August rainfall has continued to recharge the soil profile. Agriculture Victoria probes at Brim, Birchip, Speed and Taylors Lake are showing increasing moisture through the measured profile, down to one metre. At Speed the 30 centimetre sensor has gained 32 percentage points in a month.
Continued recharge this late in the season is unusual. Crops go into spring with a wet topsoil and stored moisture underneath it.
Three things that could still change the outcome
Frost. There have already been two to three mornings below zero at these stations during August, including the 27th. Soil at 30 centimetres sits near 10 degrees and has barely moved in a month. The interaction is genuinely uncertain. Soil moisture, soil temperature and crop canopy will all interact with air temperature on a frost night. Wet soil stores and releases heat overnight, which helps during a radiative frost, while a heavy canopy changes how that heat reaches the head. Crop stage, frost duration, canopy structure and topography will decide it paddock by paddock, which is why September and October matter more than any single reading.
Heat. A full profile buys time in a spring heat wave, though high biomass crops draw hard through grain fill.
Fuel. Analysis presented by Episode3 puts Australian diesel cover in the mid-20s of days in recent years. Agriculture’s share of national diesel demand varies sharply from year to year, averaging a little over 4 per cent since 2010 but rising much higher in some years, and a large harvest concentrates that demand into a short period. This year has already shown that exposure is real. Urea peaked at $1200 a tonne plus in May on Strait of Hormuz disruption and had fallen back to about $724 by mid-August. A cost that swings 35 per cent in two months on events in another hemisphere is the exposure, and the region has no local buffer against either fuel or fertiliser supply.
What is supporting the price
Canola for the week ending 24 August was $792 a tonne at Geelong, the best in four years, and it is the crop most likely to convert this season into cash. Wheat was $362 and lentils $615 at Melbourne, with new crop lentils nearer $548. Cereal hay was $290 at Shepparton, down $50 with sheds still full from last year. These are port and delivered indicators rather than Wimmera farmgate bids, which sit below them after freight, and they will date quickly.
Several things move the canola price at once: global oilseed supply, vegetable oil prices, currency, freight and competing production. The point worth drawing out is that a significant part of the demand behind it is policy-created fuel demand rather than food demand. Europe is a major destination for Australian canola, largely for biofuel.
Andrew Whitelaw’s analysis treats a domestic biofuels industry as genuine new and stable demand for grain producers, at a scale equivalent to 5 to 6 per cent of road fuel use or 40 to 45 per cent of aviation fuel use. He also names the catches. It removes food volume from the global market, which invites policy attention, and electric vehicle uptake will, over time, erode the road fuel share underneath it. For a region weighing whether to build toward that demand, both sides of that need to sit on the table.
What the volatility costs
Andrew Whitelaw’s analysis puts Australian wheat yield variability at around 27 per cent, compared with about 6.5 per cent in the European Union. The same analysis shows the national cost of farming rising from around $42 billion before 2020 to more than $60 billion today, against gross farm production of around $95 billion. Producing a good year now costs considerably more than it did five years ago.
His argument is about how farm businesses manage that volatility, and the tools are real. An individual farm can hedge price, spread crop risk, carry stored grain and manage some of its production exposure.
The regional version of the question is different and largely unasked. A region cannot hedge rainfall. A town’s employment, services, school enrolments and housing demand swing with the same season, and no financial instrument smooths that. What a region can do is reduce how much the next poor season hurts.
What the region keeps
The output side of this is not the problem. The Wimmera Southern Mallee produces more output per person than the Victorian average. The income side is. Median income here sits below the Victorian median, and the gap has widened from about $4,900 in 2003-04 to around $6,700 today, through a period when output was rising and working-age population was falling.
WSM’s own grain income build puts the indicative 2026-27 regional crop at around $1.8 billion at current Melbourne prices. Most of it leaves the region raw. The next stages of value are added elsewhere.
The response to that is not simply to process more. Plenty of regional processing has been built in Australia that should not have been, and a pprocessing plant that does not stack up commercially leaves a region worse off than no plant at all. The argument is narrower and harder to knock over: retain more value where the region holds a genuine advantage in retaining it, and build an economy in which not every income stream is correlated with the same rainfall.
That points at a specific list. Commercially viable processing where feedstock, energy and freight genuinely favour this region over another. Storage that lets growers choose when to sell. Freight that holds up through harvest rather than becoming the constraint at the worst moment. Fuel and energy resilience, given a national diesel cover measured in weeks. And farm and regional income streams that do not rise and fall with the season.
None of that gets built in a drought. That is the real argument for treating 2026 as a window rather than a result. A good year is when the region has the capital, the confidence and the attention to build the things that make the next poor one cost less.
The paddock has done the first part. The next six weeks decide the tonnes. The decade decides what we keep from them.
Sources: BushLinx weather station network; Agriculture Victoria soil moisture probes; analysis presented by Andrew Whitelaw, Episode3; published grain and fodder indicator prices, week ending 24 August 2026.