IT's hard to believe, but harvest has officially started in Western Australia.
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For the record, the first load was received at the Geraldton Terminal on September 27, being 37.22 tonne of GM canola that was delivered by Hamersley Fairfield farm that has property spread from Geraldton to Mingenew.
While the idea of harvest deliveries in September seems too early for the majority of WA's graingrowers, CBH Group general manager for the Geraldton zone Brianna Peake said at one stage they suspected a delivery might have been made a week earlier.
She said ongoing conversations with growers in the region kept everyone in the loop, so there were no surprises.
"The growers are great, when they start spraying out any canola they tell us, so we usually have about 10 days from there," Ms Peake said.
Proving it wasn't an isolated event, four farms made early deliveries and by the end of last week, the Geraldton Terminal had received 200t of GM canola with the Narngulu site, 12 kilometres south east of Geraldton, taking in 600t of GM canola.
Ms Peake said on the back of warmer weather last week they were expecting deliveries to ramp up this week, however there might be a pause with patches of wet weather expected.
She said more sites in the Geraldton zone would open as soon as they knew growers were ready to start carting grain, with the northern areas expected to be ready first.
Only canola is expected for the next couple of weeks, with wheat likely to make its way to the bins later in the month, depending on weather conditions.
While the focus is on this season's grain coming in, Ms Peake said they were still "flat out" with their outloading program from last season.
Being her first season in the big chair, having replaced Duncan Gray as zone manager in April, she was advised this was normal at this time of the year, however it was a bigger program than normal given last year's record WA harvest.
Ms Peake said their harvest casual workforce would gradually build with a lot of the training already completed
"You just bring them on when you need them, some have started, some will come on over the next two weeks," she said.
Last year CBH housed a record 3.9 million tonnes in the Geraldton zone, well up on the 2.6mt average.
Ms Peake said estimates for the zone this year were anything from about 3.5mt to upwards of 3.7mt, but the feedback from consultants she had spoken to was really good and it was shaping up to be the second best season ever.
"I don't think we will quite get what we got last year, but we will probably go higher than 3.5mt," she said.
Ms Peake said the zone was a difficult one to estimate, because of its "boom-bust" nature, pointing to harsh season finishes in the past which could dramatically reduce tonnages, but this year most farmers were enjoying a soft finish.
"I feel like some of the southern zones might be as good as last year, so if anything Geraldton might be the area where it pulls that (the final tonnages) back a little bit," she said.
In relation to the massive outloading program, Ms Peake said she was happy with what their team had managed to achieve this year.
"Geraldton will get down to about 400,000t carry-over at the end of September which is really amazing for that size crop and we have got 250,000t shipping in October and so that is amazing effort to get that amount of grain out of that scale of crop.
"So I am pretty comfortable with where we are."
Ms Peake said it was important to put some light and shade on the carry-over concerns many growers have, particularly with a lot of carry-over grain still in the system in other areas.
"Our subbies and our road contractors have been outstanding and we have had really good support from Horizon," she said.
As for the season ahead Ms Peake was buoyant.
"They are stunning, they are beautiful crops and you talk to all the growers and they are happy and they are very comfortable with the season and pricing, albeit, it has come off a little bit as I understand it, but it is still not bad," she said.
Ms Peake said there weren't many incidents of frost in the region and the soft finish had set them up.
