Farmers in northern New South Wales counting the costs following flooding

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Farmers in northern New South Wales have endured plenty of natural disasters in their time on the land from droughts, fires and more recently storms and floods.

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00:00As rivers and creeks continue to fall and flood waters recede, farmers on the

00:07north coast are assessing the destruction caused by ex-tropical

00:11cyclone Alfred, including damage to crops, pastures, infrastructure and roads. There

00:17have been some reports of livestock deaths, but nothing compared to the

00:21magnitude seen in the 2022 floods, where tens of thousands of animals perished.

00:28Some farms across the region remain isolated with flood water on low-lying

00:33roads, but milk tankers are now able to get back onto dairy farms to collect

00:38milk, following many farmers being forced to dump thousands of litres due to no

00:42access. Lush green pastures that dairy and beef cattle have been grazing on are

00:47now littered with flood debris, mud and silt. It will take time to recover. At

00:54this cattle sale in Casino, there's usually between 1,500 and 2,000 head of

00:59cattle that are sold every week, but due to the issues getting animals to market,

01:04numbers are down to 250 today. Beef producers are working as best they can

01:10with the conditions they've been dealt. It's just a nuisance flood compared to

01:15the 2022 flood. For me down the river there, it was not all the arms got the

01:20water, so that is bad, and the rainfall was horrific in the 2022 flood compared

01:28to this one. And while the livestock industry feels it was spared somewhat

01:33from what could have been a greater disaster, there has been widespread

01:37damage in horticulture, with strong winds ripping trees apart and stripping

01:41branches, trees that were loaded with nuts, bananas and coffee cherries. This is

01:46an example of what we'll have to trim more of on the farm where we've lost

01:50branches, beautiful fruit, too young, they're supposed to hold on till October

01:54spring harvest, but they flopped over so I've had to cut them off or we'll never

01:59make a pass through the row. But it's not all devastation, there is one crop that

02:04will thrive in this rain, rice, non-irrigated dry land rice. Well this

02:12has been welcomed, welcomed and probably now can go away, as you can see we've got

02:17a lot of flooding here. We were pretty dry January and February, usually we have

02:23a dryish January but also a dry February, so a lot of the crops were looking for

02:29this rain and they're going to actually thrive in all this water logging. A hot

02:33line set up to assist farmers has so far received 20 calls for assistance with

02:38emergency livestock feed and animal disposal.

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