THE rain-interrupted wheat harvest across the Central Highlands has overwhelmed Graincorp depots, with more than 500,000 tonnes of grain being trucked in.
Queensland operations manager Brad Foster said Graincorp was “doing as much as we can“ to deliver for Central Queensland growers.
“GrainCorp’s Central Queensland cluster of sites have received more than 500,000 tonnes of grain in one of the biggest harvests we’ve had in years,“ Mr Foster said.
“We re-opened our Emerald site for the first time since 2019, to create extra capacity for growers in the region.
“The site is supporting our nearby Yamala site, which has had restricted capacity to create more segregations on site given the recent weather issues.
“We also re-opened sites at Gindie and Dingo for the first time in several years, but these sites have now filled and closed.
“In saying that, we’re also busy outloading as much grain as possible from this part of the network to create some more capacity for growers.
“That includes outloading by rail from Yamala and by road from Moura to port and other sites.”
One local grower, who asked not to be named, said the harvest had exposed deficiencies in Graincorp’s capacity to handle big tonnages.
“The crops are yielding much better than normal, but the grades are lower because of the wet weather damage so they had to get extra storage for the lower grade wheat,“ he told Emerald Today.
“There’s no room at Capella and not enough at Yamala, so they opened the Emerald site and I believe the two big silos are full of feed wheat as well as the two pads.
“What’s happened over the last several years is that the harvest has been fairly poor and a lot of grain hasn’t gone off-farm because of the costs in getting it to the depot and growers didn’t support Yamala.
“This year they’ve all used Yamala in droves and it is grossly inadequate.
“It needs to be twice as big as it is.“
It is believed Yamala is the only site taking chickpea.
