Can farmers endure repeated floods and drought?
Josh Hack: Early on in the piece, we were sort of a bit worried. There was some reports from private forecasters saying, you know, 600 odd mils and there wasn't many models showing that, but the Bureau of Meteorology wasn't really showing anything until we got to the weekend before, sort of two to three days before. But once we sort of got to that one or two days out, we knew that we were going to get some decent rainfalls and we were going to get floods. And the time this river stayed up is just phenomenal. Like, 2021 hit that peak and it was coming up and then going down within two to three hours. This stayed up 30 hours above the 2021 flood. And you've got animals. So if they did seek refuge, you know, trying to stand in water and trying to hit that refuge for that amount of time is pretty draining on them.
Sam Hawley: When it looked like heavy rain was on its way, Taree Farmer, Josh Hack, knew he had to act and he was right to predict the worst. Like so many others, Josh is now facing the clean-up from the record-breaking floods that devastated large parts of the New South Wales Mid North Coast and Hunter regions. Today, we consider the plight of Australia's farmers like Josh, but also those further south, fighting their way through severe drought and ask the question, is Australia really still fit for farming? I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
News report: In communities right along the Mid North Coast of New South Wales, clean-up efforts are in full swing.
News report: More than 700 homes and businesses have been declared uninhabitable so far, but authorities are warning that number will rise.
Flood victim: It's diabolical, to be honest. There's certainly farms who have had most, if not all, their herd washed into the ocean.
Flood victim: We actually never, ever thought that it would reach that magnitude, especially where we are.
Flood victim: People are just traumatised, and some of them have been through it before. And to be back here again, it's just unbelievable.
Josh Hack: My name's Josh Hack. We have some beef cattle in the Manning Valley, but we're also contract drone pilots and also do agronomy on farms as well for clients.
Sam Hawley: Sounds like you're out and about at the moment.
Josh Hack: Yeah, mate, yeah. So we're just trying to move some of our stock off Dumeric Island, which has been hit pretty hard. And I've been lucky. I've sort of only lost a handful there, but a lot of people have lost hundreds. So, yeah, the preparation for me has really paid off. But, look, you know, no-one could really prepare for a 1 in 500-year flood.
Sam Hawley: Oh, gosh. OK, yeah. Just tell me what it's been like over the past week for you. What did you have to do to save your stock?
Josh Hack: OK, so we're at about 200 head. We moved about 40 of them with trucks and stuff, and the rest of them we just made sure we, you know, hold those cattle down into the lower areas until sort of the day or two before and then moved them to the higher paddocks as possible because we knew that they're going to be there for a while and we need to save the feed there. However, all those paddocks have gone under as well. Now, those cattle stood in the water and we've been lucky enough not to lose too many. A few calves and bits and pieces and another 20 weaners that we lost. But those weaners were in the safest part of any of the farms. They were on a hill. And they decided to jump back into the water to go back to another island. And there's nothing we can do about that. They've just decided they wanted to do that. But there was another 40 cattle with them and they didn't do that. So...
Sam Hawley: Right. Interesting.
Josh Hack: It's pretty tough. But, like, across the whole floodplain, it's just a disaster. Like, the silt levels, the fences are gone. You know, we've spent two days trying to get cattle in because the fences aren't there, trying to get them through silt, trying to get them into yards. We've got to clean yards and try and work out which yards we can get into. Then we're going to try and scrape all the silt away from the yards so we can get trucks in. Yeah, so it's quite an effort just to try and get animals out to get them to a safe spot.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, I bet. Yeah, I was going to say the aftermath is often so much worse, right? Because you see the extent of that damage.
Josh Hack: Yeah, absolutely. Every day that water went down, two to three days after, you've just seen more and more and more damage. And, you know, the town is amazing, like, the amount of people getting around and helping each other.
Sam Hawley: Yeah.
Josh Hack: But they're going to need help for a long time going forward. And from the farmer's point of view, which is, you know, where I sort of... it's my industry I work in, you know, they're going to need a lot of feed. Feed's hard to get because we've had droughts down in South Australia, Victoria, so all the feed down southern parts of the country has really sort of taken up. And then if you go to Queensland, they had the floods in Western Queensland as well, which a lot of feed went out that way. So, you know, the donated stuff isn't easy to find for people like Need for Feed. So they're going to have to be purchasing it. Like I said, it's just... it's a week or two, three weeks away, four weeks away when people... you know, that hype goes away and the energy levels drop. And speaking to one dairy farmer, you know, they went through the 2021 flood and, you know, they got back up and milking and the place was a disaster, but they had their house as a refuge. And it's just such a different thing when you don't have your house anymore and it's all full of sludge and you've got to try and work out how to clean it. You don't have that refuge you can go back to and have a cup of tea and just take the five minutes you need to take. And that's the hard bit is there's so many places now under that wouldn't have been under, you know, in those other floods.
Sam Hawley: Wow. Absolutely devastating. And as you mentioned, quite incredible that you have been through these devastating floods, but then you go south and there are so many farmers dealing with really severe drought. I mean, Josh, being a farmer in Australia, it is so tough. Are you going to keep going?
Josh Hack: Oh, look, it is. And look, these guys, they all say they're going to keep going and it's easy to say. But without the Australian support, I can tell you now, like they've been hit from pillar to post, especially locally around here. We've had the droughts from 16 to 19, 21, we had a one in a 100 year flood. In 2023, we had the driest winter on record. OK, and then 2025, we're at a one in 500 year flood. So these guys weren't back on their feet. Some of them were just getting there. But, you know, the enormity of the tasks ahead, you know, they're trying and they're trying to punch through those jobs. But the enormity of this task ahead, they need hope. And the Australian people have got to be able to give them hope. And when I say Australian people, it means the Australian government and give people hope that they're going to get the support they need in the in the short term, not to mention the long term future.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, and we need our farmers, Josh, that's for sure.
Josh Hack: Yeah, no, you do. Look, and, you know, me and my family, like we started beef farming as it's our investment. You know, we sold our house and bought cattle. So, you know, it is tough, but what's tough is seeing your mates and your friends and people that are hard as rocks, that are such good people that are just really broken. And yeah, there's a lot of them. There's dairy farmers, there's beef farmers. You go up river here to Mount George and through into Gloucester. Rivers have changed course. There's river flats that are just gone. There's pastures that have been planted across the whole district in March and April that we're all ready to feed off. So they've spent the money this year. They've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars getting their pasture ready for the year, and it's all gone. And these guys need hope so that they know that they can, you know, afford to do some of these things in the short term.
Jess Davis: I'm Jess Davis, and I'm a climate reporter, but I'm based out in Western Victoria.
Sam Hawley: Jess, we're seeing a really terrible set of circumstances unfolding for New South Wales farmers who've been coping with this devastating flooding. But if you head further south, the farmers there are in drought. And it hasn't made huge headlines until recently. But just tell me, how bad is it?
Jess Davis: It's quite stark how different the picture is in different parts of the country right now. Farmers in parts of southern Australia have been calling this the forgotten drought for the past 15 months from Ceduna, which is west of Adelaide in South Australia, all the way to Wilsons Promontory, east of Melbourne, western Tasmania. Large swathes of that southern stretch of coast have seen some of their lowest rainfall on record. And the landscape is just desperately dry. It's a normally very lush, fertile region in southwest Victoria. And if you look at the paddocks, they're just red dirt and dust. So it's really a dire picture out here.
Sam Hawley: And you have been speaking to some farmers in the region, including Charlie de Fagely. He has seen four droughts in his lifetime, and he actually thinks this one is the worst.
Jess Davis: That's right. Charlie and his wife Liz own a sheep farm with a flock of about 10,000 sheep near Ararat, which is two and a half hours west of Melbourne.
Charlie de Fegely, sheep farmer: This is probably the toughest couple of years I've had. Because it's two years. All the others were just a failed winter, failed spring, and it broke the following autumn. This is by far the worst.
Jess Davis: At the moment, he's bringing in 60 tonnes of feed every 10 days for his flock because there's just nothing left for them to graze on.
Sam Hawley: And there's a lot of farmers in that area, and many of them are now having to actually sell their stock, aren't they?
Jess Davis: That's right. Just last week, I went to the sale yards in Ballarat, and they told me that 20,000 cattle had been sold just out of southwest Victoria in the week. Now, most of those were going to northern New South Wales and Queensland. And in one way, it's one of the saving graces for farmers out here, is that until last week, conditions in northern New South Wales and Queensland have been really good. And so they've been able to sell their stock at pretty good prices. You know, other droughts that are more widespread, the prices for stock really plummet, and so you can't even sell them. But for this drought, farmers have been able to get relatively good prices. Now, something that's, you know, a big risk now is that because of the floods in New South Wales, we've seen those pastures ruined by too much rain rather than too little rain. And that's only going to push prices of hay and feed up. And there are farmers out here who are already telling me that that not only is it expensive to get feed, but they actually can't find a supply. So that is the two disasters coinciding is going to really exacerbate some of these problems. And there could be some very difficult decisions for farmers coming up.
Sam Hawley: Such a hard time for them. So, Jess, we know drought and flooding rains are not unusual in Australia, that's for sure. But these two things occurring at the same time and obviously the severity is getting worse. So what role do scientists say climate change is playing here?
Jess Davis: That's right. Australia does have a long history of droughts, but a lack of autumn and winter rainfall is something that both southwest and southeast Australia are now becoming increasingly familiar with. The weather systems that lift and carry moisture from the ocean to fall as heavy rain on land. They've been absent from southern Australia in recent months. And the majority of climate projections show this trend continuing. And it's particularly stark in southwest Western Australia, where we've seen this drying trend since the 1970s. And scientists have actually been able to attribute that to human caused climate change, largely from the burning of fossil fuels. Now, if you look at the floods, rainfall and flood predictions are a little trickier than that of heat and dry. But what we do know is that the warmer the atmosphere gets from the burning of fossil fuels, the more moisture it can hold. And ultimately, the more fuel big rain systems have to tap into. And so heavy rainfall is expected to become more intense as the climate gets warmer. The projections are a little bit trickier in rural areas and large river basins where floods are driven by multi-day rainfall events, like we saw last week and by the preceding soil moisture conditions. But there is evidence that the flood peaks for rarer flood events like this one have increased across many parts of the world.
Sam Hawley: OK, well, it does seem like it's becoming a lot tougher for farmers in Australia. When things are good, they can be really good. But when they're bad, my gosh. So I guess, Jess, the question is, can farmers in Australia actually adapt to what the climate is doing to survive, to be able to farm in this country?
Jess Davis: They can and they already are. And Charlie de Fagely, he told me that every drought they've learnt to do something differently. So that includes what they feed their sheep, what they grow in their paddocks and importantly, how they manage water. So he spent a lot of money so that every paddock has water piped and there are troughs. Through the floods there have been similar stories, including one farmer who built a ramp for his cows after the 2021 floods so that they would have higher ground to escape to. That saved his dairy herd this time around. But sadly, not all farmers will survive these kinds of conditions. They have to really implement modern farming practices and technologies and have the money and resources to be able to do that.
Sam Hawley: Jess Davis is a reporter with the ABC's Climate team. Josh Hack is a farmer from Taree. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead and Adair Sheppard. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.
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