Urea shortages forcing south-west Victorian farmers to think laterally

Inverleigh farmer, Stewart Hamilton said up the east coast of Australia and along Victoria, urea has been in short supply, for over three years.

Placing contract orders for urea over six months in advance, he ordered this months supply in October last year, but suppliers haven't been able to fulfil their contracts until the end of the month, making it difficult to plan ahead and adding further risks for farmers to manage.

"All of a sudden farmers are holding not only the crop production risk, but supply chain risk as well," Mr Hamilton said.

With earlier predictions from the Bureau of Meteorology stating a drying out this year, with the impending El Nino, so far Mr Hamilton has seen crops just as wet if not wetter than last year, which adds to urea management on farm.

"At the moment, we're getting good rainfall events coming through central Australia, which will push down through the the Mallee and they're sort of good solid rainfall events that we can go and spread nitrogen out in front of," Mr Hamilton said.

"I think 90 pc of the models were saying El Nino this year, so I suppose we're in the 10 pc, that's not to say it won't cut out and be a short spring, but while we've got the moisture we want the plants to grow as much as possible, develop roots and feed it as much nutrient as we can."

Meanwhile in Mingay, Bingham Agriculture farm managers, Sophie Bingham and Sam Sedgwick are hoping to get a decile five yield this harvest and luckily are not yet affected by urea shortages, although are wary of the situation.

"At sowing we put 50 kilograms of [Mono-Ammonium Phosphate] MAP out, and we also put 50kg of straight urea out as well with the seed, so that helped get the plant going and took the pressure off a little bit later in the year," Mr Sedgwick said.

"We've just completed our first top dressing application of urea and most of that was at 150kg as well."

However, they don't have enough urea to see out the rest of the year at this stage, they're not expecting a shortage from suppliers and reliant on getting the timing right.

"It's certainly a concern for the region as we're very reliant on it," Mr Sedgwick said, mentioning their staff said the last couple of weeks it had been difficult to source.

With their paddocks well drained, the unexpected higher rainfall hadn't been a major impact to them, but a slight warming would be beneficial, Mr Sedgwick said.