NSW Upper Hunter farmers perparing for drought
Pockets of NSW are fast slipping back into drought only a year after many parts of the country were gripped by flooding. With El Nino conditions looming, farmers are already making big decisions to weather another dry spell.
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00:00 Well the taps really have turned off not only in the Upper Hunter but pockets right across
00:05 the state.
00:06 It's as if there's been no rain for much of this year.
00:08 We're currently sitting at about half the rainfall we had to this point in 2022 and
00:13 someone who knows that better than most is Ron Campbell.
00:16 He runs cattle, sheep and some cropping as well.
00:18 Ron, how's this year been?
00:20 Well it's been very tough, very hard and a lot of hard decisions have had to be made
00:24 earlier on.
00:26 When you have very wet seasons like that, and we had two really wet seasons, you generally
00:31 find that the next season is never as much as you would like or the average rainfall.
00:37 However this time it was not very good.
00:41 If we get a crop it will barely cover costs but we're hoping that we might get some rain
00:46 in the next month or so, especially in this next month.
00:51 The August/September is very, very important for cropping.
00:56 You've also got the livestock as well.
00:57 You've got calves and lambs on the ground.
00:59 How long have you been feeding and what else do you need to think about when you're getting
01:03 those young animals on the ground?
01:05 Well continuing, if we have to wean early, which means that some of the calves will have
01:11 to be weaned as well as the lambs.
01:14 We have some lambs, I think about 400 now, Peter said that he's going to wean them.
01:18 The ewes that are lambing now, some of them are lambing which will have the replacement
01:24 first cross ewes that we use for prime lambs.
01:27 So those are some of the important breeding stock that you really need to keep.
01:33 The same thing with cattle.
01:34 We've got some of the heifers which we are feeding but they're not getting the same feed
01:39 as the ones that are going into the feeder to sell.
01:42 It's taken me a lifetime and my boys since they've been home 20 years to set up with
01:46 machinery that we can mitigate a lot of the dry times.
01:52 We grow grain, we don't buy hay, all this hay is what we make on the place.
01:57 We know that we can go straight into that within a matter of weeks and so if we do that
02:03 then there is hope, there's light at the end of the tunnel.
02:07 Well Ron, thank you.
02:08 Keep your eye on that hope at the end of the tunnel.
02:10 Hopefully it brings a bit of rain there as well.
02:13 [BLANK_AUDIO]