Southland, Otago and Canterbury were the worst hit as Dairy News went to press, with up to a metre of snow dumped inland, and floods in coastal areas.
Near Fairlie, farm manager Glen Goad was moving these New Zealand Superannuation cows into a fresh, sheltered paddock of kale.
“These are the easy ones. We’ve got more up the top where there’s two feet of snow. It’s going to be a long day,” he told Dairy News.
That was Thursday morning. The snow wasn’t forecast to stop until Saturday, with double digit frosts to follow.
“That’s when it gets really difficult because it all goes hard on top.”
Down country, near Pleasant Point, Michael Brosnahan was feeding wintering cows on an old railway embankment due to flooding. “Their paddock’s a lake.”
The weather was “getting up there” with the worst he’d experienced, having farmed in the area all his life, he said.
In Otago, David Wilson’s farm on the Taieri Plain was surrounded by flood water all week.
“The Taieri’s come up and overflowed into all the ponding areas, which is what it’s meant to do. We’re protected by flood banks all around us.”
Whether the situation worsened would depend on further rain and snowmelt inland. King tides over the weekend could “compound problems,” Wilson said.
