Last year's heavy rain in grain producing regions of Victoria has led to bumper grain crops. While farmers and exporters alike are rubbing their hands together, the challenges faced by the logistics sector are signnificant. After a couple of leaner years in the grain industry, GrainCorp's port manager of Victoria explains that this year would likely be a record year with double and triple the volumes seen previously.

In the local region, farmers routinely get four and a half to five tonnes to the hectare but this year it will be more like eight to ten tonnes. Grain crops in Victoria are typically planted around April or May and with good rainfall early last year, both farmers and exporters expected it to be normal 2016, but when the rain kept on falling, export volumes began to soar. Last year Victoria shipped around 700,000 to 800,000 tonnes of grain through Geelong, and this year they intend to ship somewhere around 2.5million tonnes. Similarly, approximately 100,000 tonnes was exported through Portland last year but this year it could be around 600,000 tonnes.

The main Victorian grains are barley, wheat and canola, being shipped to locations such as East Asia, India, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific Islands. Most of it is shipped as bulk, but in the past decade containerisation has become increasingly popular. Some of the smaller consumers who don't have storage facilities large enough to handle entire shiploads of grain (500,000 tonnes) are able to buy smaller amounts of about 500 tonnes. In this way, their risk is minimised and their flour mills can handle the amounts coming in.

A decade ago there might have been a couple of hundred thousand tonnes of containerised grain going out of Victoria and Melbourne, in comparison to today where there are about two to three million tonnes going out.