EDITORIAL

That old proverb of "you reap what you sow" is fairly much mired these days in the woes that seem to have beset our world.

We've got climate change, for instance, because we haven't been able to make a decent fist of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels.

We've also got a pandemic spreading like wildfire in many countries because governments were too slow to act on shutting down communities to keep the COVID-19 virus contained.

Jump on to social media and you'll see all manner of doom-and-gloom scenarios; and, of course, being on social media means the sense of gravity can be significantly worse than the reality.

But sometimes the reaping from the sowing can unveil, on a straight down-the-line interpretation, a pretty decent good news story.

It doesn't take much thinking to get what this means, especially in a regional area.

Year-upon-year the outlook and outcome for our primary producers can swing from one extreme to another.

The scourge of drought has been the most recent example, both in the previous couple of years and in the 2000s.

And then when the rains come, as they did just a few years back, these do so to such an extent that flooding results and valuable pastures and crops are destroyed and stock lost.

This year though has been a welcome exception. The rains, so far, have been coming at all the right times but not to the extent that the promise is washed away.

This has allowed southern Riverina farmers to get their crops in - and for many, this was earlier than around the time of the autumn break, as sub-soil moisture returned to optimal levels - and to watch as these thrive in ideal growing conditions.

Yes, it is still a few months before the crops come in, but so far all the signs are there for what is expected to be a bumper harvest. The returns could even be the best on the grain-crop front since the 1980s.

It is tremendous to see such promise, for the flow-on benefits to the wider community will be significant in these troubled times.

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