With farmers gearing up for the new winter sowing season, there is a crisis, not of their making. 

It is of course, the oil crisis. And about to supersede it, the dwindling supplies of urea fertiliser.

Daniel Linklater is a grain grower at Trentham Falls near Mildura in the Mallee. 

After two poor seasons, he was planning a big winter cropping program this year as welcome rain has left him with a full soil profile.

“Cropping in the Mallee is all about timing, so when it’s time to go, we need to be able to turn the key and get those tractors moving, and so it’s been a little bit of an anxious period in terms of just making sure we’ve got our usual supplies of fuel and fertiliser available,” Mr Linklater told Country Today.

“We have quite extensive fuel storages, which in our case we coincidentally filled everything before the proverbial hit the fan in the Middle East … and certainly we’ll need more, so I’ve been giving my distributor a heads up on when we’ll require our usual amounts into April and then into the first half of May, just to keep everything moving.”

However, it’s now more of a crisis that there is little, if any urea available.

Horsham fertiliser supplier Travis Hair, of Crop Opti services, told Country Today he was clean out of urea and had never seen such a drastic shortage.

Mr Hair said he expects that if urea came to the market in the next few weeks, prices would be about $1400-$1500 a tonne.

“There is a bit of talk that China may come back into the market. The rules around China and exports are that it has to look after its own domestic market first, before it can actually go out and sell to other countries,” he said. 

“The current China market probably won’t be sorted out domestically … probably for a good couple of months yet. Generally, for our area in the Wimmera, that’s probably going to be a little bit late.”

Extensive soil testing is key to the decisions Mr Linklater will make on whether some areas of his farm are worth sowing at all. 

“When it comes to rationing of fertiliser with what we’ve got, we’ll certainly be prioritising the most productive soil types we have,” he said.

“Because we’ve come off such average to poor seasons, and a very dry summer, we haven’t contracted any more than what you’d call a very base level of nitrogen. To get additional urea is proving to be quite difficult, so, yes, fertiliser is my bigger worry than fuel at the moment. 

“When you’ve got a good season you’ve got to be in a position to take advantage of it, so it would be a pity to think supply constraints would actually prohibit it for many growers this year.”

The entire March 25, 2026 edition of The Weekly Advertiser is available online. READ IT HERE!

The entire March 25, 2026 edition of AgLife is available online. READ IT HERE!