With the first few laps of Cobbler canola under his belt, Chad, who farms with wife Julie, said it was the first time in years there had been a “normal break” in Wandering.

“We’ve had dry starts for a lot of years – this is a bit more like it used to be in Wandering,” Chad said.

“It’s been a while since we’ve seeded into moisture without dust.

“In the past few years we’ve just had nothing there and the plants have had to survive on whatever moisture was on the surface.”

The couple have received 40mm of rain since April 29 and while the wet weather is more than welcome, to an extent its timing caught the couple unaware.

With spraying, seeding, stubble burning and lambing all earmarked for May, things are set to be busy for the Fergusons – not that Chad is complaining.

“What is good is that we’re going to be lambing on green feed … we haven’t done that for a while either because we lamb fairly early in May,” he said.

“This is the first time for a while that we’ll have lambs on the ground with green feed.

“The biggest thing was we had the summer rain as well so we’ve got the subsoil moisture there.”

“The prospects generally are much better this year than what we’ve seen for a couple of years and its still only early May. There are still a couple of weeks to go before we would stress out over lack of rainfall in any way.”