CROPPERS in south-eastern Australia are moving ahead with their sowing programs in spite of a lack of opening rain.
While there are concerns about light rain germinating small seeded crops like canola without sufficient moisture to allow them to continue to grow, farmers believe the advantages of early sowing generally outweigh the negatives.
"You could wait but then with crops taking a while to germinate it starts to get pretty late, especially for a crop like canola," said Horsham district farmer Tim Rethus.
"There is the concern about the plants dying but history has shown it is rarely borne out," Mr Rethus said.
"The numbers show us that the best way forward is to sow early and to plant hybrids, so that's what we've done," he said.
"We'll probably push through the program, you want to give the plants as long a growing season as possible especially when the break is a little late."
He said with a disc sowing system sowing dry was more efficient than sowing into moisture as well, further consolidating the plans to plant early.
In terms of moisture, Mr Rethus said it had been a dry start to autumn although he said much of the canola was on hay or green manure paddocks meaning there would be subsoil moisture available.
In the Ouyen district in north-west Victoria Adam O'Callaghan was busy planting Yallara hay oats dry last week.
Mr O'Callaghan said there had been very little summer rain, which presented some problems.
"We would have really liked to have get some of the grain that was on the ground germinated before cropping," Mr O'Callaghan said.
He said he was not full steam ahead with the sowing program, instead planting the hay crops first before hoping for rain before getting grain crops in.
Fellow Ouyen farmer Ian Hastings said with the cereal-heavy rotations in the area having volunteer cereals coming up in crop would be a problem.
"We've had issues with 'warley', where volunteer barley is present in the wheat, before and it is something that we'd be really keen to avoid, especially as we not growing the big tonnes that mean we can afford to just sell the product as feed."
Mr Hastings said the other problem created by the dry summer was that herbicide residues had not broken down.
"In particular there are a lot of imi-tolerant crops grown in the area, we haven't had the summer rain to break down the herbicide so farmers will probably have to use an imi-tolerant line once again to avoid plantback issues."
The state's north-east has had up to 200mm for the year, but it has dried off through April.
Andrew Russell, Rutherglen, said he was planting canola, but it was not without concern.
"I have to keep telling myself canola is a registered weed, it is a pretty hardy plant, but with the cost of seed it is a bit of a risk," Mr Russell said.
He said he would plant canola dry but would probably hold fire once that was done.
"We're not too badly off in terms of subsoil moisture but we'd love to see a bit of rain to get the crops up and going.
"The soils are already a lot cooler so we probably won't see crops bouncing out the ground with moisture and warm soils like we have the past two years.
"The pastures, which came up on March rain, have really stopped to a crawl with the dry and cold weather, they will fire up again with a bit of a drink.
"We've been lucky with a couple of good early breaks in recent years, this is not something unusual but we would love to see a good rain in the next couple of weeks before the days really shorten up."