Recovery on the West Coast
Dairy farmers in the Buller region of the South Island are at last making progress getting their properties up and running following the devastating floods that hit them in February.
Some farmers have lost nearly a third of pasture, which has been covered in silt. West Coast Federated Farmers president Bede O’Connor says the recent floods hit farmers much harder than last July’s event, which caused major damage in the town of Westport.
“These recent floods were more of a rural event and it affected a lot more farmers. Especially hard hit are those around Reefton, Inangahua, at Shenandoah, Springs Junction and in the lower Buller area, where many of the same farms were also badly hit in July,” he told Rural News.
“Reefton and Inangahua didn’t get that badly affected in July, but this time they have taken the brunt of the storm. There is quite a bit of infrastructure damage with fences and tracks gone and some have had access to runoffs cut as well.”
O’Connor says there have also been a number of coastal farms that have been affected by streams blowing out and changing course on farms or running over paddocks. He says they weren’t even anywhere near the Buller River, but there was such intense rain that a number of farms have had streams cut and tanker tracks destroyed.
O’Connor says, at this time of the year, it’s quite possible for some farmers to turn things around fairly quickly because the grass is still growing. However, he adds that farmers have to get out now and start re-grassing so the pastures are ready for spring.
“But for other guys it will be ongoing infrastructure repairs such as fencing. For some of them, the river moved 50 metres from where it was and the same for the streams, so it’s not just a simple fix and it involves diggers moving gravel and doing things like that.”
O’Connor says farmers like himself in the lower Buller who were hit in July have suffered similar damage to what they had then. He says about 25% of his pasture has been damaged by silt in the latest event but he reckons it is fixable, and one of the risks of farming near a river.
“It’s a bit annoying because we had just finished repairs from the last flood a week or two before this event and we are now probably going to have to re-grass again.”
O’Connor now milks 280 cows on his 160 hectare- effective block. He had to lease out 40 cows after the July floods, which wrecked much of his pasture. He’s now milking once-a-day, but he believes if the weather is good in the coming months, they should be able to recover through a bit of clever management and thinking outside the box.
Further north up the coast at Karamea, farmers there also suffered damage to their properties, but O’Connor says, with probably one exception, most of the problems have been fixed. He says the fact that road to Karamea was blocked by slips meant that milk tankers from Westland Milk Products couldn’t get through. He says milk had to be dumped for two of three days.
Now the emphasis is on quickly getting things back to normal while the weather is good.
Rural Support
Bede O'Connor, who is also a member of the local Rural Support Trust, is urging farmers who need help to ask for it and also to look after their neighbours and help out other farmers in need.
Meanwhile the Government has announced an initial support package of $200,000 to the local Rural Support Trust to help farmers and growrs recover from these latest floods.
Rural Communities Minister Damien O'Connor says the funding will help speed up the recovery of farming businesses. He says it also includes wellbeing supprt and specialist technical advice and enables the use of Enhanced Taskforce Green workers should they be required to help.
