Headers are getting bigger, more complex and more expensive and so is the global demand for them.
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Chinese manufaxcturers of harvesters are developing much larger as available labour decreases
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Headers are getting bigger, more complex and more expensive and so is the global demand for them.
The value of the international combine harvester market today is estimated to be around A$20 billion dollars and is predicted to nearly double by 2030.
Every month, somewhere in the world, you will find a harvesting machine working its way through the annual harvest of 2,790 million tonnes of grain (2020), which equates to 10,000 shiploads at 27,900 tonnes each.
From Australia to Argentina, Sudan to Saudi Arabia, China to Chile you will see the annual grain harvest taking place – putting 1.1 billion tonnes of corn, 775 million tonnes of wheat, 505 million tonnes of rice, 159 million tonnes of barley, 62 million tonnes of sorghum, 25 million tonnes of oats and 14 million tonnes of rye into the globe’s granaries.
Global production comprises some of the world’s smallest producers, such as Qatar, which harvests just 5,000 tonnes off land reclaimed from the Gulf Sea in what must be the world’s most expensive grains – producing crops they proudly call Golden Organic.
On the other side of the equation, the world’s biggest wheat and rice producer is China, which harvested and ate its way through 136 million tonnes of wheat and 211 million tonnes of rice last year and still needed to import more to feed its rapidly growing middle class.
Not to mention the world’s highest yielding wheat crop in New Zealand, which clocked in at 16.79 tonnes per hectare, or the world’s fastest-expanding area of arable cropping land in the central part of Brazil, which has grown from 26 million hectares in 2000 to over 50 million hectares today – nearly double Australia’s entire dryland cropping area.
Across the globe the demand for combines, big and small, is growing faster than the world’s grain production as farmers seek bigger and more efficient machines to get the crop off.
The combine harvester market includes more than just the big European and American names we can all recall (Agco, Claas, Deere, CNH) but also a swag of other lesser known and completely unknown brands including Rostov, Rostselmash, Kubota, Mahindra, Dasmesh, Kartar, Preet, Sdf S.P.A. Iseki and TAFE. This doesn’t even include about 30 Chinese manufacturers responsible for the two million units, mostly between 60–120 horsepower (45–89kW) and costing $30,000–$60,000, which are working in China today.
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WAFarmers CEO – Trevor Whttington
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While the Asian machines might be small, compared to US, EU and Russian machines, the one thing they all have in common is every manufacturer is racing to make bigger machines. Why? Because, everywhere in the world, agriculture is facing a labour problem.
Farmers from Argentina to Russia, China to Sudan are reporting either a skills shortage, a labour shortage or a cost of labour problem.
In India, farmers are complaining about the increasing cost of labour as skilled workers head to the city in droves, chasing better paying jobs, forcing farmers to contract in harvesters to replace manual workers or upgrade to larger self-propelled machines.
This has resulted in over 6,000 additional machines being added to Indian farmers’ inventory last year in the race to get their 300 million tonnes of grains off farms and onto dinner plates.
Even Russia, with its highly skilled workforce, has a problem as a result of its declining population. The nation’s mega farms, with hundreds of harvesters each, are in the process of rolling out automated headers that mirror the actions of a master unit as a way of stripping out labour costs.
And, of course, here in Australia farmers are spending up big, replacing machines with newer models because they can’t be guaranteed fast access to mechanics or parts in case of a breakdown, or they are buying bigger models to replace two smaller machines as a result of a lack of access to skilled operators.
What does this mean for Australian agriculture?
Our farmers are experiencing probably the world’s biggest labour challenge, with a shortage of holiday visa workers, an ongoing local skills shortage and rising occupational health and safety risks combining to force farmers to seek to replace labour with new capital equipment.
The competition for labour will see harvest costs increase as farmers bid to attract workers from a limited pool of bodies and, more importantly, talent.
As a result, the days of $25-an-hour workers are long gone as farmers work out the cost benefit ratio and risk of putting either a totally unskilled worker or an expensive skilled worker onto a chaser bin or header and hoping they don’t hit the one power pole in the paddock.
Expensive machines demand expensive skilled labour and without backpackers and with a mining boom underway, farmers can expect to see a rapid increase in hourly rates.
In time we will look back in wonder at how we got away for so long with paying harvest workers a fraction of the value of what they bring to getting the harvest off. Either we compete with the rest of Australia for labour and pay more, we open the gates wider to expand the imported worker pool to tap the skilled Eastern Europeans and South Americans, or we follow the Russians and invest in automated machines.