If you’d walked into a grower’s shed in May last year and told them Australia was about to bring in its second-largest winter crop ever, you’d have copped a polite nod and a change of subject. South Australia was bone-dry. Victoria’s Wimmera looked like it had given up. Even chunks of Western Australia — the reliable workhorse — had dustbowls where paddocks should have been. The sensible money was on another mid-range season, with the southern states dragging the national total down.
Then the rain came. And kept coming. And the 2025/26 harvest turned into something close to a miracle.
National winter crop production is now estimated at 68.4 million tonnes, up 13% on last year and 15% above the five-year average — the second-largest winter crop on record Department of Agriculture. It’s a harvest that will underwrite roughly $13 billion in combined wheat and barley export earnings alone, and it’s shifted the conversation from “how bad will it be?” to “how do we get it all to port?”
But before anyone starts planning the celebration, the next chapter is already being written, and it’s looking drier. A lot drier.
The headline numbers are genuinely remarkable
Start with the big three. Wheat production landed at 35.99 million tonnes — the third-largest crop ever, and the biggest since the record 40.55 Mt of 2022/23. Barley smashed through the previous record of 14.65 Mt (set in 2020/21) to hit 16.33 Mt — an all-time high. And canola came in at 7.68 Mt, second only to the 8.44 Mt of 2022/23.
Put another way: three of the four biggest wheat crops in Australian history have now landed within five years. The barley record is brand new. The canola number is the second-best ever. If you’re looking for evidence that Australian cropping has shifted its productivity baseline upward — driven by better varieties, better agronomy, and the quiet revolution in water-use efficiency — this is it.
ABARES itself pointed to “improved farming practices that conserve soil moisture and improve water use efficiency, together with advancements in seed varieties as the reason crops punched above their weight in tough conditions. That’s not a throwaway line. It’s the single most important trend in the industry, and it’s the reason below-average rainfall no longer automatically means a below-average harvest.
The state-by-state story is where it gets interesting
The national number hides some wild divergence between states. This was not a uniformly good season — it was a tale of two coasts, and within each coast, a tale of two halves.
Western Australia did what Western Australia does. GIWA has called the 2025/26 WA crop at 27.35 million tonnes — a record, and the state’s fourth record in five years. “Adequate rainfall in July and August in most areas followed by mild temperatures during grain-fill allowed crops to push water use efficiency to very high levels”, GIWA report author Michael Lamond noted. Three of WA’s five port zones delivered exceptional yields. The only real sour note was frost in the central regions, which GIWA reckons shaved over a million tonnes off the wheat total alone.
South Australia was the comeback story of the year. Winter crop production is estimated to have jumped 68% to just below 9 million tonnes, reflecting timely spring rainfall at critical growth stages and mild spring temperatures. After a genuinely grim 2024/25, the bounce-back has been emphatic — though ask anyone in the Mallee whether it feels like a full recovery yet and you’ll get a considered silence.
Victoria quietly produced one of its best ever. Winter crop production increased 30% to 10.1 million tonnes, the third highest on record. Lentil production hit a new record of 925,000 tonnes, driven by both area and yield, and the Wimmera’s October-November rainfall turned what looked like a hay-cutting season into a real harvest.
Queensland kept doing Queensland things: production up 2% to a record 3.9 million tonnes, with chickpeas at 975,000 tonnes — the second highest on record. The return of Chinese demand for Australian chickpeas has made this a very profitable pivot for northern growers who’d diversified away from the crop during the trade dispute years.
Then there’s New South Wales, which perfectly encapsulated the season’s bipolar nature. Overall production fell 10% to 18.4 million tonnes — still the fourth highest on record, but the state average masked a split between favourable conditions and above-average yields in the north, and below-average growing season rainfall and disappointing yields across southern NSW. If you farm the Riverina or the southern slopes, this wasn’t a good year, regardless of what the national headlines said.
The $13 billion export question
So what does all this tonnage actually mean in the bank?
ABARES expects wheat export value to fall 13% to $8.6 billion in 2026/27 — which puts the 2025/26 wheat export haul at roughly $9.9 billion. Barley export value is forecast to fall 10% to $3.1 billion in 2026/27 but remain above the 10-year average, implying around $3.4 billion for the current year. Add them up and you’re looking at roughly $13.3 billion flowing into Australia from just two crops, with canola contributing another chunk on top.
That’s excellent news for growers sitting on unsold stock. It’s less excellent news for anyone hoping prices hold up.
Total global grains and oilseeds production is expected to reach a new record high for 2025/26. High global carry-in stocks are expected to place downward pressure on wheat prices in 2026/27. The Black Sea is back in full export mode, Russia has had another huge year, and Canada’s carry-out is building. In plain English: the world is awash with grain, and Australia’s massive production just added to the pile. Expect bids to keep drifting lower as the year rolls on, unless something dramatic happens somewhere.
The smarter traders are already looking at this. The question being asked around the boardroom tables is whether growers still holding grain should be pricing more aggressively into the front end of 2026 before the global balance sheet gets any heavier.
Which brings us to next season — and the mood is shifting
Here’s where the story turns. Because while the industry is still cashing cheques from 2025/26, the 2026/27 crop is already being planted, and the signals aren’t great.
ABARES is forecasting the gross value of farm production to fall 6% to $95 billion in 2026/27, with wheat production forecast to fall, canola production forecast to drop 9% to 7.0 million tonnes, and most of the other big categories softening. The main reason? Water.
Much of Australia is expected to receive below-average rainfall during autumn 2026. The Bureau of Meteorology has indicated that the 2025/26 La Niña is close to its end, with all models showing continued warming in the tropical Pacific and a neutral ENSO state favoured through at least late autumn — and some models are starting to sniff at an El Niño transition later in the year. That’s a flashing yellow light for anyone planning a big program, particularly across the southern states.
“Currently, conditions going into the winter cropping season are quite poor in many parts of southern Australia, and this situation could either deteriorate further, or improve with above” — ABARES was pretty blunt about the uncertainty. Cropping farms have the widest potential variance in profits for 2026/27 of any Australian farm type, simply because the climate die hasn’t been cast yet.
Growers are responding. GIWA’s initial estimate has WA growers planting 8.93 million hectares this season — up slightly on last year’s April estimate, but well below the record 9.45 Mha that was eventually sown in 2025/26. Lamond noted that “most growers were already planning to take a more risk-averse approach in 2026 anyway to preserve capital following the recent good run of years”, with the combined cost blowouts of fertiliser, fuel and chemicals forcing growers to drop their least profitable paddocks from seeding programs.
That’s a telling piece of sentiment. After back-to-back bumper years, the smart operators aren’t doubling down — they’re trimming, building balance sheet, and waiting to see what winter delivers.
So what’s the takeaway?
The 2025/26 harvest will go down as one of the great save-from-the-jaws-of-defeat seasons. Growers who dry-sowed into dust in April ended up delivering record or near-record yields. The productivity baseline has shifted, barley is now a genuine volume crop alongside wheat, and WA continues to make the east coast look slightly disorganised by comparison.
But three things are worth keeping front of mind as the industry moves into 2026/27:
First, the global grain market is heavy, and Australia is sitting on large carry-out stocks. If you’re a grower still holding grain, the price trajectory from here is more likely down than up.
Second, the autumn outlook is poor and the climate is transitioning. History says we shouldn’t write off the season in April — the 2025/26 crop itself proved that. But the risk profile has changed, and budgets should reflect it.
Third — and this is the one the industry keeps underappreciating — the productivity story is real. Australian growers are extracting more tonnes per millimetre of rainfall than they were a decade ago, and that’s the single biggest reason a below-average year no longer means a disaster. Whatever 2026/27 throws at the paddock, that trend is doing the heavy lifting in the background.
Bumper years come and go. The capacity to grind out 55-60 Mt even in mediocre seasons is the quiet transformation worth watching.
