Australian growers can look forward for a bountiful harvest season as the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Research Economics (ABARE) released its forecast on Tuesday which pointed to an estimated 40 million tonnes of yield that would mostly come from the rain-soaked areas of the country such as New South Wales.

In its latest report, which was made in conjunction with the Bureau of Rural Sciences, ABARE said that the current weather combinations of flooding rains and consistent sunshine in the eastern part of the country could lead NSW farm productions to achieve a high of 14.5 million tonnes of winter crops, surpassing by almost twice the size of the state's drought-stricken output last season.

On the other hand, the situation in Western Australia could be grim for the region's farmers as ABARE deputy executive director Paul Morris revealed that the state's dry spell would continue and its winter crop yield would decline by more than 20 percent to about 9.7 million tonnes.

Across the country, the optimism for more rains was further enhanced by the Bureau of Meteorology's latest pronouncement that more than sufficient rainfall would hit most of the country by up to 65 percent of possibility.

Along that line and despite the gloomy prospect in WA, ABARE is upbeat that Australian farms' general good showing would be sustained farther into the summer season as it predicted that wheat, barley and canola, the country's three key grain produces, would deliver higher winter harvest figures while summer crops such as rice and cotton should provide considerable results for most farmers.

The bureau said that Australia's summer output would jumped by 52 percent to around 3.8 million tonnes in fiscal 2010/11 though it warned that locusts could easily wreak havoc on the impressive prospects as hatchings have commenced in the regions of Queensland and South Australia.

ABARE noted that locust plagues could lead to devastating consequences for individual farmers but it stressed that past occurrences, including the last major plague that destroyed crops in 1993/94, had been largely eclipsed by the overall national harvest results.