Australia's rice bowl — the Riverina in southern New South Wales — is expecting to ramp up its production tenfold this season.The crop will be 10 times larger than the 2020 rice crop that was impacted by drought and low water allocations
It would be a marked turnaround from earlier in the year when drought and low water allocations in the Murrumbidgee and Murray valleys led to SunRice receiving its second lowest crop on record at just 45,000 tonnes, less than 5 per cent of its market requirements. "While it's not the 700,000 and 800,000 tonnes we have had in the past, it's certainly more than enough to cover all of the overheads in the Riverina.
He said provided there was no further deterioration in trading conditions in the second half of the financial year, the company would be able to deliver a fully franked dividend to shareholders. To handle the forecasted huge haul of rice, the SunRice Group is on the hunt for more mill staff at its Deniliquin and Leeton sites for harvest next autumn.
This comes on the back of the company shedding more than 200 staff through redundancies over the past two years due to drought and low water allocations reducing milling operations.