On Monday the hope was of the light showers clearing to allow the headers to snaffle up the remaining quarter of the crop that is still standing in paddocks.

But now the painful reality – especially for producers on the Eastern Downs – is of their headers probably lying idle till the end of the week, prompting fears of severe crop downgrades.

This year's Queensland harvest has been marked by a later than average start, an unusually large amount of crop coming into maturity at the same time, plus a run on header contractors who have struggled to meet near-desperate calls to clear paddocks ahead of the summer storm season.

With the estimated wheat harvest revised down from 2 million to about 1.8 million tonnes, there is one up-side in the shape of much-needed rain for a summer crop that reportedly has got off to a patchy start in many districts.

"While it's looking ugly for people who want to harvest wheat, it's good for those people wanting to grow a sorghum crop," Dalby Bio-Refinery Ltd commodity manager Peter Wylie said.

"We have been living from hand-to-mouth with the sorghum crop on the back of some areas receiving quite useful rain but there are other areas that are still quite dry, needing more rain to turn it into something useful."

But the worry for many grain growers is of the implications of Weather Bureau meteorologists predicting three to four days of back-to-back showers during the bulk of the week, according to AgForce Grains policy director Lindsay Krieg.

"That could really do some damage with the later crop likely to be in a bad way after this – especially if it (the weather) hangs around," he said.

"It (the crop) will just fall over and then start sprouting which means it goes straight into the feed bin."

* Extract from a special report in Queensland Country Life, November 20 edition.