Less rain, more wheat: How Australian farmers defied climate doom

In a newly sown wheat field, Curtis Liebeck scoops up a fistful of sandy soil and lets it pour through his fingers. The light-brown dirt bears little resemblance to the dark, clumpy earth of rainier nations. The Liebeck farm, 300 kilometers (186 miles) from Perth in Western Australia, gets half the rain of the wheatbelts of central Kansas or northern France. Growing-season rainfall across the state’s crop lands has declined by about one-fifth over three decades. That should make farming harder. But Liebeck’s wheat yield has doubled since 2015. (View the story on Reuters.com: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/less-rain-more-wheat-how-australian-farmers-defied-climate-doom-2025-07-29/) Liebeck, 32, is part of a revolution in farm management that has enabled Australia to produce around 15 million metric tons more wheat annually than in the 1980s, despite hotter, drier conditions. The increase is equivalent to around 7% of all wheat shipped around the planet each year and more ...