The evolution of lentil farming

Red lentils are a key crop for southern Australian dryland croppers, providing rotational benefits as well as high gross margins.

The crop started from humble beginnings in the 1990’s when the running joke was, “you grow lentils until you run out of seed” - indicating the low success rate for the crop.

In the mid-1990’s the introduction of new, better adapted lentil varieties (Northfield and Aldinga from SARDI and Cobber and Digger from AgVic), together with a group of entrepreneurial growers, agronomists and marketing companies, spawned a successful and valuable new industry.

Pinion Advisory’s own Tony Craddock, in his former life with the SA Department of Agriculture, was at the forefront of this revolutionary crop in SA. Tony managed and delivered the very successful Lentil Check program from 1995 to 2000, which saw the establishment of discussion groups across SA’s cropping districts. Lentil Check facilitated growers and agronomists learning how to grow this new crop, dramatically increasing the crop’s success rate.

In the following decade, growers identified optimal times of sowing for lentils, how to effectively control broadleaf weeds and, most importantly, how to manage fungal diseases with preventative fungicides to further increase yield potential.

The next revolution came with the introduction of imidazoline (imi) herbicide tolerant lentils, which enabled the management of key weeds that had previously limited their adoption. Growers could now manage vetch, tares and medics, which had previously ruled out lentils in many paddocks.

Herald XT was the first of the imi- tolerant cultivars, released in 2011, and later replaced by the significantly improved HurricaneXT variety in 2014. HurricaneXT went on to become the most widely grown lentil variety in Australia.

More recently, the release of HighlandXT and , GIA Thunder has continued to improve yields and the adaptability of lentils, with returns from lentils commonly exceeding those of all other crops grown. The success of the crop is evident by the continual expansion of lentil production into ‘non-traditional’ lentil growing areas of the northern and southern Mallee, Eyre Peninsula and the South East of SA.

Since 2000, lentils have grown in area from 18,000ha to over 400,000ha, in 2024. As a result, Australia is now the third largest lentil producer in the world.