Farmers tackle ‘overwhelming’ damage
OPINION: Many farms have a fencing budget of
$20,000 to $50,000 a year, depending on their size. With Cyclone Gabrielle ripping through Northland, the East
Coast and further afield, a lot of them are staring down bills of $250,000, even $400,000.
That’s 10, 15 or 20 years’ worth of fencing budgets in one hit. It’s an overwhelming number and very difficult to stomach.
It’s why farmers putting in massive hours to get their properties and production back into some sort of working order are incredibly grateful for the
Post Your Support scheme.
The programme, which is being driven by Farmlands, Federated Farmers and media company Stuff, is all about encouraging New Zealanders to donate fencing materials – posts, wire, netting, strainers – or the money to buy them.
That sort of support is a real godsend.
Government funding means those farmers and growers impacted by the two cyclones can apply for up to $10,000 to help with recovery tasks – restoring access, clearing debris, putting fences back up. That’s fantastic, and farmers are grateful, but, honestly, for many farmers it’s not going to go that far.
We’ve had a lot of big storms come through Tairāwhiti in the last five or six years, but the scale of Gabrielle, and the fact it has gone through a much broader area, was exceptional. Hopefully it’s a once-in-a-generation-only type of event.
To get extra help from fellow New Zealanders with restoring fencing is really going to lift spirits. It doesn’t matter the size of the donation; every little bit of support helps. It’s another post or coil of wire a struggling farmer doesn’t have to find the money for.
Tens of thousands of kilometres of fencing has been damaged. There are farms up our way in Gisborne where every single fence on the property has a gap blown out in it, or it has completely gone.
The boundary fences are crucial. The first task is to keep valuable livestock on the property, and off roads.
Internal farm fences are next. Back in the early days, many farms had huge paddocks – 200, even 400 acres. It was a timeconsuming task to muster stock – really inefficient compared to modern farming. Cyclone damage to fences has wound back the clock to those days.
Internal fences are also about managing grazing. If there are too many animals in one paddock, it gets over-grazed.
Grass doesn’t grow as much over the cooler months, so farmers need to calculate how much feed there’s going to be, and the demand from livestock, so that there is enough for them to eat until the grass starts growing again. We pride ourselves on our high animal welfare standards.
Your whole system of ensuring there is enough feed at the right time through the seasons is stuffed if the fencing is compromised.
Adding to the challenge is the fact that restoring fences, especially as we head into winter, can’t be rushed. Iron standards and netting may be the most practical stopgap until the ground dries out and slopes stop moving.
There is nothing more demoralising than redoing a kilometre of fencing only to have another 50mm of rain and it being left in three pieces again because a weakened hill above it has come down.
The small silver lining in all this, and a boost for resilience, is that where fences need to be completely restored, we can look to do that in alignments or contours that are more stable and farming-efficient.
The Post Your Support campaign is a real morale-booster for farmers under stress. Federated Farmers sincerely thanks anyone who gets in behind it.