It is just a tick before 7.30pm and a huge mound of wheat and barley from Victoria and New South Wales is building inside the hold of the Vosco Unity.

If tonight's shift goes smoothly, workers from grain storage and handling company Australian Bulk Alliance will load between 5000 and 6000 tonnes of grain as part of a 44,000-tonne shipment destined for Vietnam.

But this load is just a small part of a record harvest for Australian farmers. The recently stripped 2011-12 winter crop is estimated at 45.4 million tonnes, according to figures released last week by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences. This is 6.9 per cent up on last season and easily eclipses the previous record 43.4 million-tonne harvest of 2003-04.

Low wheat prices may be frustrating farmers as they languish at about $170 a tonne thanks to a world oversupply and a stubbornly high Australian dollar, but demand for Australian grain is still high.

So far in 2011-12, three out of every four tonnes of Australian wheat has been exported. The year before it was two out of every three tonnes. Most years, well over half the Australian wheat crop goes overseas.

There is so much wheat to export — and such strong demand for it — that the Australian Bulk Alliance terminal at Appleton Dock is fully booked until October.

The terminal, less than two kilometres from Etihad Stadium, is one of only three bulk wheat export terminals in the state. The others are at Geelong and Portland.

Australian Bulk Alliance chief executive Simon McNair said the terminal was about to reach a milestone: the next shipment will see exports from the terminal pass 7 million tonnes since it was commissioned in 2000.

"At the moment we're as busy as pretty much we can be," he says. "For the four months from October to the end of January this year, we did 2.5 times the volume that we did in the previous year."

Average load sizes have grown and are now "getting closer to 40,000 tonnes", whereas during the drought they were "probably closer to 20,000", he said.

Andrew Weidemann from the Victorian Farmers Federation said export markets were crucial to the grains industry. "They're vital to the Australian economy, really, and farmers' bottom line," he says.

Australian growers are well placed to meet the increasing demand from Asia, he said. "The Asian market is extraordinarily important to Australia. It's growing year by year."