Some farmers are choosing not to plant crops this season, a decision that could potentially lead to a nationwide food shortage lasting for months.

“We’ve run out of fuel twice already,” an independent supplier shared, expressing the current challenges.

Every day, this supplier faces the difficult task of informing farmers who anxiously visit to ask, “When will the fuel arrive?”

“These farmers have been forced to go to larger service stations, only to be turned away because they can’t fill up their pods,” the supplier explained.

Richard Smith, responsible for delivering fuel to farms spread across hundreds of kilometers, noted that they’re even losing orders.

“We were expecting a delivery of 46,000 liters on Monday, but it was redirected because another buyer offered more money than we could,” Smith remarked.

Chris Groves in Cowra is using his fuel sparingly and cutting back on the wheat and canola he sows, instead replacing them with grazing varieties.

“The long term ramifications of that is we’re going to see in the supermarkets and the community later on,” he warned.

Ed Fagan from Mulyan is skipping winter grains altogether, instead banking on his beets, which depend on water pumped by diesel.

“It is not knowing when that next delivery is going to come and you know we’re using diesel every day, I can’t stop it,” he said.

Whether planting, irrigating or harvesting, more than 85 per cent of farms across the country rely on diesel.

Farmers say this is the wake-up call Australia needs to prioritise our reserves over exports.

“Our competitors in Canada and the US and Europe and Russia all have a lower cost of production than we do,” Fagan said.

“Most of them make their own oil and gas so they’ve got an advantage on us.

“So we’re in a position where we’re probably the most exposed of any agriculture country on earth.”

Groves added: “We need to be able to source fuel, we need some sort of measure to say that fuel will be no more than X amount of dollars by harvest.

“That would then give some people the confidence to go ahead and plant a crop.”

The situation is bad now, and the fear is, it’s only going to get worse. Farmers are bitter.

“I probably put more of an emphasis on what the analysts are saying rather than the politicians, because you know, they lie for a living so why would you believe them on this,” Fagan said.