Mark O'Brien
Weston Cereal Industries
Tamworth NSW

It's not only primary producers who benefit from using climate information in their management decisions. Grain purchaser Mark O'Brien bases his business decisions on a sound understanding of climatic indicators such as the SOI, sea surface temperatures, rainfall records, precipitation forecasts and analysis from the software package Rainman. Mark is the national grains manager for Weston Cereal Industries in Tamworth NSW, a major grain processing company. He purchases grains for animal diets and flour. 'The fortunes of grain crops are influenced by the weather and so is the demand for stock feed by the grazing industries' said Mark.

'If the Southern Oscillation Index is indicating poor rainfall, it is more likely we will have a high demand for and reduced supply of stock feed. That has price implications, so I have to make purchasing decisions based on that. It also gives an idea of potential demand for stock feed, so we might make labour decisions too.

'The other important area is related to the grades of wheat that are produced. Most parts of Australia have an exportable surplus of wheat in nine out of ten years, but a flour mill only uses specific qualities or types of wheat. The supply of that can be influenced heavily by a cool, wet finish or a hot dry finish to the wheat crop.

'We use climate information as an indication of whether high protein wheats are going to be hard to get, low protein wheats will be hard to get, or the crop will be downgraded to shot and sprung or stockfeed standard.'

Mark began seriously using climate information after the 1994 drought.

'There was a very good paper published in 1993 where researchers Nichols and Rimmington correlated Australia's wheat yield by State with the SOI for the previous 30 years' said Mark.

'I thought NSW and QLD showed reasonably good correlation and that's what woke me up. I only became aware of that paper in 1995, after the 1994 drought had been quite a lesson for everyone.

'I was also strongly influenced by several published papers showing that plant growth correlates to the SOI more strongly than it does even to rainfall' said Mark.

'In the Victorian mallee rainfall is not very well correlated to the SOI, according to many. But this other paper showed that the mallee wheat yields correlated with the SOI substantially better than they correlated to rainfall.'

Mark now finds climate information is an integral part of his management and purchasing decisions. He looks at long-range forecasts, in combination with keeping an eye on the weather on a daily basis.

'In 1996 indications were for good winter rainfalls, and we thought it might be hard to get high protein wheat, because protein levels are related to winter rainfall' said Mark. 'We contracted wheat much earlier in the year.

'In 1997 the SOI just plunged during April and it influenced us to buy a greater than normal amount of our wheat early on to ensure supply. By the Spring the price of grain had gone up about 70% because of the very tight winter.

'Weather is also of interest and is probably more heavily used than climate in my job' said Mark. 'That's partly because you can immediately see the outcome of a weather event, whereas climate is not usually correlated as well.

'For example, in 1991 we had a drought here in the eastern States. I was running around in meetings in Sydney and I didn't get a chance to look at the satellite weather faxes each day.

'Someone offered sorghum at a particular price and I thought we haven't sown the sorghum crop yet, perhaps I'd better buy that as security. But they had looked at the satellite chart and seen a big mass of cloud coming across whereas I hadn't.

'After that rain the market fell seven percent within a week. It taught me to look at it each and every morning!'

Mark finds his climate information from the Internet, from the summary of the Bureau of Meteorology's Seasonal Climate Outlook and from using Rainman software, which he has been doing since it was available.

His major complaint with much of the climate information available from services such as the Bureau of Meteorology is that it is in a raw form, which isn't useful to farmers.

'The Bureau has good knowledge, but has difficulty relating it to people such as myself who have to make a decision' Mark said.

'It's far more useful to talk to people such as Roger Stone from the QLD Centre for Climate Applications, who analyses what's happening and translates it into an agronomic context.'

This was true in 1999 when Mark looked at the rapidly falling SOI and felt that it indicated a season of reduced rainfall. He contacted Roger for clarification.

'Roger uses phase analysis and he told me to have a look at Rainman, and that I'd find you can still get small but useful rainfalls during those years' said Mark.

'He said that we'll get smaller rainfalls, but Rainman will show that the chance of getting a sowing rainfall so you can establish the crop is as good a chance as most other years.

'That's exactly what occurred. We've had below average rainfall, but we got the sowing rain that we required in early June and it was enough to get the crops established.'

'I'm amazed that more farmers, particularly those under 40 with tertiary training, don't avail themselves of the services of applied climatologists like Roger Stone and Peter Hayman (from Agriculture NSW in Tamworth), to interpret the climatic data for them into a farming context' said Mark.

'The correlation between wheat yields and the SOI phase in QLD is around 65%. In NSW as a whole its about 45%. In other States it's substantially poorer, but a huge amount of the variation in your crop growth is explained by that.

'If you knew absolutely nothing else, you could still do a lot with that information.

'Life's a big enough gamble. The people who are making decisions over 40-50 years will be well ahead in the long term by taking the climate into account.'