Primary Industry
Issue No. 1 - July/August 2001
with the grain
by Richard Henderson
While early South Australian grain crops — at that stage only wheat and barley — continued to produce up to 30 bushels per acre, much of the flour went to feed the thousands of men working on the NSW and Victorian goldfields; much of the gold found its way back to this colony in payment.
During and after the Second World War the Federal Government created the Australian Wheat Board, ostensibly to ensure the country had a strategic reserve of grain. The Board soon became the sole marketing body for wheat export. The Australian Barley Board was created soon afterwards.
The next major development in the grain industry was bulk handling. Before bulk handling, all grain was stored in bags. Bag storage was expensive, time consuming and did not protect the grain from weather or vermin damage. Farmers coped with periodic shortages of bag materials.
The first grain silo in South Australia was built at Ardrossan on the Yorke Peninsula by the Australian Wheat Board in 1952, taking advantage of the shore installations set up at that port by a miner — BHP. Its success was instantaneous. It handled 108,000 tonnes of wheat in its first year, some from farms more than 100 km away. Queues up to a mile long formed.
Ardrossan’s success prompted SA’s grain growers to get together and form South Australian Co-operative Bulk Handling in 1954. Using a loan half-guaranteed by the State Government and tolls charged to growers (paid back in full later), SACBH began building silos across the State.
SACBH operated under the Bulk Handling of Grain Act (1955), which guaranteed the company exclusive franchise as the State’s sole bulk handler. Under the strict regulations of the time, the movement of grain across state borders was rigorously controlled, as were grain exports.
In the 1990s the tide of deregulation sweeping Australian commerce swept up the grain industry and the entire domestic market was deregulated. ...
