Tasmania grappling with seed storage shortage

Thousands of tonnes of ryegrass seed is being dumped on the ground on farms and headers could be forced to stop harvesting some specialty crops with the state’s seed storage facilities now at capacity.

The state’s two major seed cleaning and storage facilities, Heazlewood Seeds at Whitemore and Tasmanian Seed Dressing and Storage at Carrick, have been turning away customers this week – and the harvest has just begun.

Storage pressure has been building in recent years but intensified this summer with a compressed season due to cold weather and a late start combined with record yields.

The “perfect storm” has highlighted the need for more seed storage infrastructure.

“In the 15 years I’ve been here I’ve never seen more pasture seed piles on the ground – and there’s more commodity to come in yet,” Heazlewood Seeds general manager Duncan Heazlewood said.

“We handle the bulk of the ryegrass for the state, which in turn provides the majority of Australia’s pasture grass requirements, but there’s no way we’re going to be able to process enough seed to handle what’s coming off.”

“The only option is for farmers to store it in piles on-farm if they don’t have some back-up silos – and they don’t like doing that because it means double handling.”

To combat the storage problems some farmers are improvising, using sheds usually used for grain and fertiliser to store their pasture seed, while hoping for the backlog to clear before their autumn supplies arrive.

Grass seed can be stored on the ground using a method that involves making a wall of hay around it to keep animals out, set back by about a metre, and then letting rain harden the top crust of seed so water then runs off.

As long as the seed is picked up by autumn it can be processed without loss.

However cereal crops, vegetable seeds and hemp seed cannot be stored on the ground so when storage runs out the harvest must stop.

Tasmanian Seed Dressing and Storage has so far this season handled large volumes of pasture seeds and ryegrasses, cereals and pulses plus specialty seed like chicory, clover and vegetables.

General manager Morgan Leath said his facility takes the majority of the state’s hemp seed but he’s got storage set aside for that commodity.

“This problem has been building for a while and although we’ve received several large government grants to help upgrade our operation, there needs to be some major investment into storage silos to cope with future harvests,” Mr Leath said.

“Overyielding is a problem – farmers do deals with contractors to grow more seed with no thought put into whether there is capacity to clean and store it.

“We’ve moved to a model where we lease land to those who are proactive with their storage requirements and that’s proving successful.

“We have 60 x 50-tonne wheat silos on site – but more farmers need to get on board with that option or the government, or contractors need to invest in more infrastructure.

“To add another cleaning line cost us $1 million dollars years ago so to do that now would probably be up around $4 million, which we’re not able to absorb.”

Tasmania’s pasture seed crops provide the majority of Australia’s requirements while pea, bean, carrot and beet seed are mainly exported.

“If we say we’re full, harvesting shuts down because you can’t put cereals on the ground. The headers have to stop,” Mr Leath said.

“I’ve just got off the phone from a customer who has started harvesting oats and its going into the trucks – so far he’s taken 25 tonnes from one field.

“I only have one 40 tonne silo available, but he’s got another 160 tonnes yet to be harvested.”

“A lot of seed goes to Midlands Seed for human foods – supplying bakeries with seeds for breads and peas for the snack food sector.

“There hasn’t been as much canola this year but it still keeps us occupied.”

At Heazewood Seeds another issue has been noted.

Mr Heazelwood said that so far this harvest there’s been a lot of light seed lines being delivered, where the seed is high in volume but not well threshed out through the headers, resulting in dead seed needing to be cleaned out.

“Light seed slows down the cleaning process, often taking twice as long to process and that issue comes back to how the crop is managed on the farm and can indicate the water was turned off too early and the seed didn’t fill out,” he said.