Despite the ducks and a cold snap in January, the summer crop is on track for a promising April harvest with many growers anticipating a 10 tonne per hectare yield.

Local grower Pat Sergi said his 400-hectare crop is tracking well but the next few weeks were vital to what sort of quality and tonnage he will see in April.

“It’s got the potential to be as good as 2010 but it’s also got the potential to be as bad as the 2006 crop, or whenever we had that really cold year,” he said. “We had better establishment than we did last year and we didn’t have any problems with ducks, unlike some other farmers.

“I’m still budgeting on 10 tonnes to the hectare but that depends on whether we got any damage from that cold weather in January, it could drop to 7t/ha but we’ll know a bit more in the next couple of weeks.”

SunRice’s Mike Hedditch said despite the challenges, the crop was looking good across the region and the company was expecting about 50,000 hectares to be harvested in the Murrumbidgee, 6000 up on last year.

“Rice crops in the Murrumbidgee region are in reasonably good shape given the challenges growers faced this season,” he said.

“The very low night temperatures in January will have caused some damage to crops, but it is impossible to forecast the impact with any accuracy.

“Despite these challenges, most crops are likely to produce yields close to average.”

But Mr Sergi said growers were still concerned about the prices they will get for their crop.

“Pricing is still up in the air,” he said.

“There was a lot of support for the industry from growers this year and we would like to see that support returned in our prices. I did plant less than last year because I decided to put in 100 hectares of cotton. I want to keep growing rice and make it a part of my rotation as long as it’s viable.”