Fruit and vegetable farmers in far north Queensland are rebuilding after tropical Cyclone Jasper

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Last year tropical cyclone jasper left the crops of many fruit and vegetable farmers in far north Queensland decimated.  Now they're trying to rebuild, but it's a mammoth effort – as landline's Halina Baczkowski has found out.

Transcript

00:00 The McLaughlin family was hit very hard.

00:13 The result of the cyclone has seen production cut by over 60%.

00:17 Staff have also suffered.

00:19 The farm can employ up to 130 people, made up of travellers and locals.

00:25 The transit staff have been let go and they have scaled back from five full-time picking

00:29 teams down to two.

00:32 Wow.

00:33 Wow, Mark, this really does show the power of the water, right?

00:39 Yeah, that's right.

00:40 So this is one of many jobs on the repair list for 2024.

00:45 We were more worried about, you know, the main picking areas of the farm and it took

00:49 us three or four days to actually stumble across what had happened just here on the

00:52 edge of our headland, or what used to be a headland.

00:56 And so what did happen?

00:57 I mean, this is quite remarkable and I assume this wasn't here before.

01:01 No, it wasn't.

01:02 So I think when Jasper was hovering stationary for that three, four day period, the first

01:07 three days was nice, gentle soaking rain.

01:09 And then the 250 mils plus we got on the Sunday, none of our catchments or systems could keep

01:15 up with that sort of volume.

01:16 And that's what happened here.

01:18 So we've got a dam just above here and the overflow pipe and spillway just couldn't keep

01:22 up.

01:23 So water being water has found a new course and taken quite a lot of earth with it.

01:27 And it's kind of lucky that this happened here because just behind us here, you've got

01:31 a whole block of papaya.

01:33 Yes.

01:34 So that's one thing we need.

01:35 And with papaya, we need access every single week into every block that is currently being

01:40 picked.

01:41 One of the biggest challenges for the wet season as land becomes repetitively soaked, then

01:45 you start having bog tractors, bog trailers, herbicide tractors, foliar spraying.

01:49 It's just unfortunate that we need so much access during such a wet time of the year.

01:56 Can you recover from this?

01:57 I mean, it's been a huge amount of losses.

01:59 Yeah, it is.

02:01 It's going to take a huge dent in the war chest to rebuild and to restructure back to

02:05 the numbers that we were doing post cyclone.

02:07 But we've, this is far north Queensland, and we've been through other events, cyclonic

02:12 disease, pest before.

02:15 So this is what we know and this is what we'll do.

02:18 Yeah.

02:18 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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