Wheatbelt (Australia)

This article is about the Australian agricultural regions. For the administrative region of Western Australia, see Wheatbelt (Western Australia).

Australian wheatbelts comprise inland agricultural regions across southern and eastern Australia.

The regions are named for wheat, which was the main agricultural product in the early history of Australia's modern development - today many other crops are also produced. The wheatbelt is arid with low levels of underground water, making agriculture largely reliant on the rainfall. Rainfall varies from the coastal regions which has more dependable rain to the drier and more volatile inland regions. In the wheatbelt both land productivity and prices tend to be determined by the level of rainfall. In addition to wheat, the wheatbelt produces coarse grains (including barley, oats, sorghum, and maize), oilseeds (including rape seed, sunflower, soybean, safflower and linseed) and legumes (including lupins, peanuts and various peas beans and lentils).