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.