A late season combined with a large chickpea harvest, falling prices, packers already at capacity and long waiting times for unloading has made it nearly impossible for some growers to meet November contract deadlines.
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A Mungindi farmer, who wishes to remain anonymous to avoid reprisals from buyers, spoke to the Country Leader and said track possessions, lack of container availability, the odd rain event and a compressed delivery schedule are factors that have made the buyers and packers job more difficult.
"It is no more reasonable to have the grower pay for those impacts as it is to have the buyer pay for the additional costs because of extra fungicide applications during the growing season," he said.
"It's been a big year for chickpeas and most packers can only handle around 1000 or 2000t per day and there was a late start, with no receivals in late October and early November," he said. "The chickpea harvest really only got under way from November 15 onwards."
Most of the receival sites have been ill prepared for the late influx of chickpeas causing huge delays delivering and unloading of anything from 14 to 24 hours with trucks lined up, waiting to unload directly into containers.
With an estimated record chickpea crop and strong prices for forward contracts before the harvest got under way, prices have since fallen by around $250 per tonne.
There also seems to be some underhanded tactics with "buyer's call" clauses in contracts, which mean the buyer can demand delivery early in the contract period, sometimes before the crop is stripped. If the farmer (who may not even be aware of this clause) is unable to meet the demands, they wear the costs.
"It's important that if there's a buyer's call in a forward contract, that it states 'once harvested' to protect growers," he said.
"Given that the buyers write the contracts and determine everything within the contract, why then are the growers being penalised when, come November 30, they are ready to deliver the chickpeas but the site they nominated for delivery is full and won't accept the loads?"
He explained that in some cases where packers have introduced time slot arrangements and limited growers to one slot per day, meeting contract deadlines becomes impossible.
"How can we deliver 1000t in two weeks if we are limited to 60t per day?”
If the packers can only pack around 1000t per day they can only take about 18-20 road trains, which means they can only deal with 18 or 20 trucks per day," he said.
"Growers shouldn't be penalised for this.
"Farmers in the region are coming off the back of three bad years," the Mungindi farmer said. "We have already stressed our overdraft to plant the crop, treat it with fungicide four or five times and then harvest it."
He wants buyers and packers to step up their game "post farm-gate in the supply chain" to either cover the costs of a compressed harvest and slow delivery system or improve the infrastructure for better handling.
"They need to provide the service or pay the cost of not providing this service.
"As growers, we need to be able to rely on our contracts - the buyers and packers need to be ready, willing and able to accept the chickpeas. If they can't, then they are in breach of contract - not the grower," he said.
"My point is that each party has to account for their own risk. Holding grain on farm has costs associated with it. The in-load, out-load and carry costs are all well recognised and accepted between the trade but the trade seem very resistant to recognise those costs when dealing with growers.
"Some of these delivery problems could be solved or at least better managed if rail infrastructure was better and a more liquid freight market was able to develop as a result.
“Rail ought to be the most efficient way of moving grain, the only reason it is not in some circumstances is aging infrastructure. If the rail network was better then we wouldn’t be carting the grain by road 200, 300 or 400km, we would be going to the local rail head and put it on rail and take it to centralised super size packing sites 2000t at a time.
“There are a number of grain storage assets stranded along branch lines as it is. Funding for that though is another conversation."