Less rain, more wheat: How farmers defied climate doom

In a newly sown wheat field, Curtis Liebeck scoops up a fistful of sandy soil and lets it pour through his fingers. The light-brown dirt bears little resemblance to the dark, clumpy earth of rainier nations. The Liebeck farm, 300 kilometres from Perth in Western Australia, gets half the rain of the wheatbelts of central Kansas or northern France.

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Growing-season rainfall across the state’s crop lands has declined by about one-fifth over three decades. That should make farming harder. But Liebeck’s wheat yield has doubled since 2015. (View the story on Reuters.com:) Liebeck, 32, is part of a revolution in farm management that has enabled Australia to produce around 15 million metric tons more wheat annually than in the 1980s, despite hotter, drier conditions. The increase is equivalent to around 7% of all wheat shipped around the planet each year and more than the annual harvest of Britain.

Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity have exceeded those in the United States, Canada and Europe, according to US Department of Agriculture data, and continue to rise while those of other developed markets slow or reverse. The ability of Australia’s farmers to produce more wheat for a growing global population owes largely to a cluster of innovations since the 1980s that changed the seeds farmers plant, how they plant them, and how they cultivate the soil, many growers and researchers say.

These advances have been turbocharged by Australia’s system of applied research, and by a relentless quest for efficiency among farmers who receive minimal subsidies.

This account of how Australia’s wheat growers defied the climate odds is based on interviews with more than 20 farmers and researchers, a review of more than a dozen academic papers and an examination of decades of farm and weather data. Reuters visited four farms, a seed-breeding company and two government research facilities.