Why the Next Three Months Could Decide the Future for Western Australia Farmers

After months of bad weather and tor­ren­tial down­pours in the most impor­tant olive-grow­ing months of 2016, olive farm­ers in Western Australia are hop­ing for the start of 2017 to be dry, in order to com­bat the losses expe­ri­enced from wet con­di­tions the year before.

Australia, as a whole, expe­ri­enced sev­eral months of wet con­di­tions in 2016 — some­thing that’s proved a boon for live­stock farm­ers but a curse for many involved in agri­cul­ture. And while cur­rent weather con­di­tions are opti­mal, many farm­ers remain at high risk of mas­sive losses due to a lack of insur­ance.
See Also:Complete Coverage of the 2016 Olive Harvest
There are an esti­mated 1.5 mil­lion olive trees in Western Australia alone, which thrive best in dry, mod­er­ate-to-warm tem­per­a­tures and func­tion poorly in weather extremes. In areas where rain is usu­ally scarce, a dis­rup­tion to the usual pat­terns of rain­fall can also cause incon­sis­tent crop­ping issues.

Olive farm­ers were forced to har­vest their crops early due to the warm and wet weather expe­ri­enced in the last year’s first quar­ter and had smaller yields to show for it.

Overly moist and warm cli­mate leads to pre­ma­ture ripen­ing, cre­at­ing poor fruit set and destroy­ing plant tis­sue. Early and heavy rain­fall is absorbed by the olives which swell and fall off the tree, and the per­sis­tent mois­ture can lead to the trees devel­op­ing sooty mold, a black pow­dery coat­ing that envelops the tree, taint­ing the fruit and its oil as well as neg­a­tively impact­ing the tree’s abil­ity to pho­to­syn­the­size.

While heavy rain proves ben­e­fi­cial for the grove itself, it does not bode well for the suc­cess­ful pro­duc­tion of olive oil. In instances where the olives become spoiled, some farm­ers bring in wild goats to con­sume the over­ripe water­logged olives car­pet­ing the grove floor.

Despite last year’s out­comes, farm­ers are opti­mistic about 2017, with gen­eral farm­ing pro­duc­tion set to exceed $60 bil­lion for the first time, thanks in part to increas­ing cat­tle and sheep exports. The wet weather that spells dis­as­ter for olive farm­ers is one that actu­ally ben­e­fits live­stock farm­ers, as it increases the amount of nat­ural grow­ing feed for their ani­mals.

Another rea­son for opti­mism is that the call for warm weather seems likely to be heeded, with the Bureau of Meteorology fore­cast­ing tem­per­a­tures exceed­ing 45°C (113°F) in cer­tain parts of the state. However, experts are still strongly rec­om­mend­ing that farm­ers take up insur­ance, as cur­rent fig­ures show that only one per­cent of Australian farm­ers have cov­er­age.

This low level could be attrib­uted to the fact that Australian farm­ers pay stamp duty per­cent­ages exceed­ing 10 per­cent on their insur­ance pre­mi­ums. In addi­tion, most multi-peril crop insur­ance poli­cies (which are taken out at the begin­ning of each farm­ing sea­son as a safe­guard against the entire season’s loss) do not cover nat­ural events such as flood­ing and heavy rain­fall.

An alter­na­tive is index insur­ance, which cov­ers events ver­i­fied by weather bureau data, but this pol­icy is unpop­u­lar with cer­tain under­writ­ers due to the high vol­ume of pay­ments it has incurred over the years.

• ABC Australia