The country's winter crop is expected to produce some 19 percent more bountiful harvest this year as compared to the 2009/10 yields, this despite the flooding that ravaged large areas of Queensland and Victoria and the drought that denuded tracts of farmlands in Western Australia.

According to the latest estimates issued by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) on Tuesday, some 42 million tonnes of winter crops would be collected in the country.

The figures slightly retreated from the December projections of 43.1 million tonnes of haul predicted by ABARES right before the January floods that wiped out some of the produce though it appears now that the loss was minimal.

ABARES said that in Western Australia alone, where a widespread drought hampered farming activities, farms are projected to harvest up to 1.4 million tonnes from the produce earlier set in December.

On the other hand, the eastern part of the commodity-producing regions of Australia is tipped to suffer harvest declines of about 2.5 million tonnes, which ABARES has attributed to the flooding disaster seen in the months of January and December.

Despite the dismal effects of the combined flooding and drought that hit the nation, ABARES deputy executive director Paul Morris said on Tuesday that Australia saw its national agricultural production soaring.

When pitted against the previous results, Morris said that the latest numbers pointed to production spikes of 20 percent to 26.3 tonnes, in which barley, canola and cotton yields all registered double-digit growth.

The latest ABARES figures showed that both barley and canola productions jumped by 18 percent and 11 percent respectively, with the former producing harvests of 9.3 million tonnes while the latter yielding 2.1 million tonnes of produce.

Also, Morris noted that amidst the floods that blanketed much of the cotton growing areas of Queensland, the product is still poised to collect some 839,000 tonnes of harvest, which he said is a record for the sector.